Federal Deficit News Better Than Expected

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Table 1. Total Receipts, Outlays, and Deficit (in billions of dollars)

 

Receipts

Outlays

Deficit

FY2008 Actual

2,524

2,978

-455

FY2009 Estimates
    May 2009 Budget

2,157

3,998

-1,841

    August 2009 Mid-Session Review

2,074

3,653

-1,580

FY2009 Actual

2,105

3,522

-1,417

The Federal Budget deficit was actually better than expected based on estimates done in May and August. The government’s fiscal year ended on September 30. The Treasury and OMB said the decline in the deficit from the August Mid-Session Review estimate reflected outlays that were $132 billion lower than expected in August, in large measure because of lower-than-anticipated outlays by the government’s TARP. The decline was also the result of receipts that were $31 billion higher than estimated in the Mid-Session Review. The final $1,417 billion FY2009 deficit figure was $424 billion lower than projected in the FY2010 Budget, released in May,

Government receipts in FY2009 were $419 billion lower than in FY2008 — a reduction of 16.6 percent.  This was largely a result of the effects of the economic slowdown on incomes and corporate profits and the tax provisions in the Recovery Act, enacted in February 2009. Primarily because of the government’s economic recovery efforts, outlays for FY2009 grew by $543 billion, or 18.2 percent, from FY2008. 

Source: U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter R. Orszag  details of the final Fiscal Year 2009 budget results. 

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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