October 28, 2022
The President just said this about the federal deficit.
Is that true? What does it actually mean? Are we still in debt? And have we ever been in a surplus?
So many questions. I’m going to answer them right now. But before I tell you the answers understand that the government runs on fiscal years. Meaning October through September.
Is what the president said true? Yes.
According to the latest numbers from the treasury department the federal deficit for fiscal year 2022 was just under $1.4trillion. ($1,375,388,552,955) That’s down more than 50% from 2021.
A federal deficit happens when our government spends more than it brings in. So in this case, the federal government spent $1.4 trillion more in 2022 than it brought in.
So are we still in debt? Absolutely. The national debt is different than the national deficit. The national debt is all the annual deficits combined plus the interest owed. Do you want to know how large the national debt is? Now – this is total over our country’s history. Brace yourself. The national debt is more than $31 trillion ($31,252,264,539,655).
Have we ever been in a surplus? Yes. In the last 50 years the US has actually run a federal surplus five times. Most recently we had budget surpluses during several of President Bill Clinton’s years in office. Fiscal years, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 – which started in October 2000. That totaled more than $550 billion dollars.
For comparison, the largest federal deficit we’ve seen in recent history was under president trump in fiscal year 2000. Our federal deficit was more than $3 trillion. Most of that money was due to covid spending, stimulus checks and all the other things the government did to keep the country afloat during the pandemic.
We saw another large deficit in fiscal year 2021 of almost $2.8 trillion. – which started under Trump in October of 2020 and finished under President Biden in 2021.
But then you can see for 2022, that deficit was cut in half.
More from the White House on the reduction in the federal deficit here.
More from the Treasury Department about the Federal Deficit here.
More from the Treasury Department about the Federal Debt here.
