As FY 2020 starts, deficit jumps more

As most of our political media focuses in on the impeachment hearings, the Trump Administration not only released its regular October Treasury Statement, but also gave estimates on the federal budget for each of the next 2 years. And the Trump folks are probably happy that media didn't have the energy to talk about the fiscal issues.

Because the budgetary numbers are not good. The Trump Administration now projects the FY 2020 budget deficit to be even higher than the $1 trillion+ that the Congressional Budget Office estimated in August.

And the reason the Trump Administration says the deficit will decline in FY 2021 is because of a $200 billion+ increase in revenues, a jump of more than 6%. I'm not buying that when it seems very possible that we will be in recession by that point, and at the very least in a low-growth maximum growth scenario like we are in at the end of FY 2019.

Also, the October 2019 numbers were bad on both the revenue and spending sides. Despite the GOP Tax Scam already being in place with its lower withholding tables in Oct 2018, we had less money taken out of people's paychecks last month.

Income tax withholding
Oct 2018 $111.3 billion
Oct 2019 $108.6 billion

In addition, there was a large jump in corporate income tax refunds in the major filing month of October.

Corporate tax refunds
Oct 2018 $0.96 billion
Oct 2019 $4.23 billion

Those two factors led to a decline in revenues of $7.2 billion last month vs the same month a year ago. Before inflation. On the spending side, outlays were up $26.8 billion, leading to a total increase in the deficit of $34 billion.

Maybe this gets fixed with the calendar for the next month, but as FY 2020 begins, the country's fiscal situation is flashing major warning signs for now