We officially have the biggest deficit in American history

Several news outlets are reporting that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office now expects a record $400 billion deficit this year, easily eclipsing the old record for the largest deficit in history, which was $290 billion in 1992, the first President Bush’s last year in office.

But what some of the stories are leaving out is an interesting little detail — we’ve already broken the record for largest one-year deficit, and it’s only June.

It turns out that the deficit for the current fiscal year, as of the end of May, was $291 billion. Amazingly, this means it took the Bush administration less than a year to run up the biggest budget shortfall in American history. Very impressive.

The truly remarkable thing about these enormous deficits and mushrooming national debt is how quickly things fell apart. It was just two years ago, after all, that the U.S. was enjoying the biggest surpluses in the nation’s history. We were on the road to doing the impossible — eliminating the national debt once and for all.

Indeed, Bush as a candidate ensured voters that he believed deficits were “dangerous.” He called for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution because, he said, we “owe it to our children” to keep the federal budget away from deficits. Bush even went so far as to endorse a Republican Governor’s Association resolution saying that balanced budgets “[improve] the economic prospects of all Americans, especially middle-income families and the disadvantaged.”

After his inauguration, Bush continued to talk of his commitment to steer clear of deficit spending. In his first address to Congress, he called moving towards deficits a “dangerous road…so we must take a different path.” Bush said his economic policies would “[pay] down an unprecedented amount of our national debt.”

“Many of you have talked about the need to pay down our national debt,” Bush said in February 2001. “I listened, and I agree. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now, and I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in debt during the next 10 years. At the end of those 10 years, we will have paid down all the debt that is available to retire. That is more debt, repaid more quickly than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history.”

What a difference two short years make. Instead of paying down $2 trillion in debt, we’re adding at least $4 trillion to the debt. Instead of retiring more debt faster than has ever been repaid, we’re adding more debt faster than has ever been borrowed.