Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

The federal government’s budget numbers for August are in. Not surprisingly, they show a wave of red ink flowing out of Washington, D.C.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the August deficit was “$198 billion…$3 billion less than the deficit in August of last year.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is bad indeed:

The cumulative federal budget deficit for the first 11 months of fiscal year 2020 was $3.0 trillion, CBO estimates, $1.9 trillion more than the deficit recorded for the same period last year… Revenues were 1 percent lower and outlays were 46 percent higher through August 2020 than in the same 11-month period in fiscal year 2019. CBO projects that the 2020 deficit will total $3.3 trillion. At 16.0 percent of gross domestic product, that would be the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945.

The true costs of a pandemic and the resultant government-mandated shutdowns are becoming clearer with each new batch of budget data. But it’s important to remember that official Washington has a spending problem long before anyone ever heard of the coronavirus.