Special Report: Global Financial Crisis
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. federal
budget deficit soared to 569 billion dollars in the first four months of the
current fiscal year, the highest on record for this period, the Treasury
Department reported on Wednesday.
The deficit for October 2008 through January 2009 was
six times more than the red ink during the year-ago period and has already
surpassed the imbalance for all of last year, which was 454.8 billion dollars, a
full-year record.
In the first four months, the government's revenues
totaled 773.5 billion dollars, down by 10.2 percent from the year-ago period,
reflecting weaker corporate tax revenues and falling individual tax payments as
a result of a deepening recession.
Government spending over the period, however, shot up
by 41.3 percent from a year ago to 1.34 trillion dollars. Much of that surge
reflected massive costs for the financial bailout package the Congress approved
last October.
For January alone, the federal budget deficit totaled
83.8 billion dollars, in contrast to a surplus of 17.8 billion dollars in the
same month last year. Economists had been expecting a smaller imbalance of 78
billion dollars.
The Congressional Budget Office has projected that
the federal budget deficit will hit an all-time high of 1.2 trillion dollars in
the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2009.
The estimate doesn't include the cost of a huge
economic stimulus bill that U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is seeking
approval from Congress.
House and Senate negotiators on Wednesday agreed to
pare the cost of the bill to 789 billion dollars, smaller than the Senate's 838
billion dollars bill approved on Tuesday and an 819 billion dollars version of
the legislation passed last month by the House.
Private economists estimate that the budget deficit
for this current fiscal year will hit 1.6 trillion dollars.
In the 2007 fiscal year, the federal budget deficit
dropped by 34.4 percent to 162 billion dollars, a five-year low since an
imbalance of 159 billion dollars in 2002, reflecting faster growth in government
revenues than spending.
The 2002 performance marked the first budget deficit
after four consecutive years of budget surpluses.
