Financial blog Zero Hedge said the Biden administration will display more of the hypocrisy that has characterized not only the entire past four years, but also Harris' presidential campaign, which had $1 billion in funding a month ago but ended up in failure, bankruptcy and debt. Of course, the U.S. debt binge has become somewhat synonymous with the success of the U.S. economy.

According to the latest data released by the U.S. Treasury Department, in October, the first month of fiscal year 2025, the United States spent $584.2 billion, an increase of 24.3% over the same period last year, setting a new record for government spending in October. Based on the moving average of the past six months, after eliminating abnormal months, spending reached $586 billion, which actually reached an all-time high. The record-breaking spending spree during the COVID-19 pandemic alone pushed up government spending.

The main drivers of the wider deficit included increases in spending at the Departments of Health and Human Services and Defense, which increased 12% and 13%, respectively, after adjusting for calendar differences. Health care spending alone increased by $62 billion compared with the same period last year.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government collected only $326.8 billion in tax revenue, a sharp 19% drop from $403.434 billion in October last year, and an even greater drop from the $527 billion in tax revenue collected in September 2014. While spending continues to grow exponentially, tax revenue has stagnated, with the six-month average in October being just $380 billion, the same as three years ago.

The reality is worse than it looks: According to the Treasury Department, tax revenues in October last year were unusually high because of deferred income taxes received that month from companies and individuals affected by disasters such as the California wildfires. Taking this into account, a Treasury official said the budget deficit in October this year will be 22% higher.

Regardless, the two net amounts mean that the US deficit for October ballooned to a staggering $257.5 billion, and although this includes several calendar adjustments – which explain the unusual surplus in September, which was due to calendar effects – a figure that is not only $25 billion larger than the consensus estimate of a $232.5 billion deficit, but also a staggering four times larger than the $66.6 billion deficit for October 2023. Worse, it is the second-highest October deficit on record, surpassed only by the month when the US went on a spending spree to prevent a total economic collapse.

To put the deficit in context, October – the first month of the fiscal year – was almost the worst start to a fiscal year on record for the U.S. Treasury, with only fiscal 2021 (October 2020) having a larger deficit.

The decline means that interest payments over the past 12 months saw the first (very slight) month-on-month decline since August 2023 - from $1.133 trillion to $1.126 trillion.

That’s because the weighted average interest rate on total outstanding debt was 3.30% at the end of September, around a 15-year high but slightly lower than the previous month, marking the second straight monthly decline.

However, don’t expect the decline in interest payments to last, because even though the Fed has cut rates twice since September, this has been offset by a surge in debt, which at the latest reading is approaching $36 trillion. Unless Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) manages to shave trillions off spending, this is what the U.S. debt will look like in the coming years. Guaranteed interest on said debt will soon become the single largest category of spending for the U.S. government.

These shocking figures illustrate the enormous challenge facing Trump and all those who pledged to control the U.S. debt, which has soared to 120% of GDP after four years of Biden's "drunkard" profligacy.

Trump invited Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to work on ways to cut spending, and the numbers released Thursday showed that most of the spending was politically difficult to resolve, in other words, even the nearly $2 trillion in cuts Vivek suggested would provoke a revolt.

Article forwarded from: Jinshi Data