This Years Deficit is $1.885 Trillion!

The national debt stands at $11,910,000,000,000.00 at the end of the fiscal year on September 30. That's $1.885 trillion higher than last year. In other words, the reports that this years deficit was only $1.4 trillion is, in effect, a lie that leaves an "unreported deficit" of $468 billion. The Obama administration is playing accounting games to make the deficit seem to be much lower than reality by taking the remaining TARP funds and the auto bailout funds out of the equation. This is dishonest in the extreme as bonds were sold and the amount added to the debt just as much as if it were part of the deficit. This years deficit is only good when you compare it to the CBO's estimates,

CBO’s receipts estimate of $2.106 trillion was about $1.4 billion higher than actual. Its “outlays” estimate of $3.515 trillion was $6.7 billion too low. “Outlays” is in quotes because many disbursements the government makes, most notably those related to the Troubled Assets Relief Program, are treated as “investments,” and their Net Present Value (NPV) is excluded from “outlays,” even though by any sane reckoning the money involved in these “investments” has been “laid out.”

Though this move by Treasury conveniently serves to make what used to be mostly routine reporting on the deficit nearly indecipherable, we do know that when the conversion to NPV accounting took place, the government’s “outlays,” and therefore the reported deficit, went down by over $175 billion. There have been additional TARP “investments” made in General Motors and Chrysler since then. It’s pretty obvious that the reported deficit if computed handling TARP on a cash basis would be much higher than the officially reported $1.417 trillion. Based on the detail in Trea