The federal government’s fiscal year just ended, and the Treasury department reported the summary of the 2023 Fiscal Year.  Here are the highlights…I mean, lowlights!

Total spent: $6.13 Trillion - that’s $6,130,000,000,000, just to give a little impact!

Total revenue brought in from all sources: $4.44 Trillion

Net deficit - just simply subtracting $4.44T from $6.13T - was $1.69 Trillion

The year before (FY2022), total debt increased $2.50 Trillion. You'd only have to go back 15 years to FY2008 when the national debt first surpassed the $10 Trillion mark to see that Debt has increased 335% in just 15 years!

 More than half of this spending goes to either to the Social   Security Administration or Department of Health & Human   Services to provide social security benefits, Medicare,   Medicaid, and other health and income security programs.

 National Defense accounts for 13% of federal spending.

 A concerning trend is the increase in federal debt service,   which is the amount of payments that are needed on the exploding federal debit. In FY23, debt service was 11% of spending, but as debt rapidly climbs along with substantially higher interest rates, that new debt AND refinanced debt becomes a lot more expensive. The fear is that debt service will begin to take up a much bigger part of government spending.

To put debt service in perspective, if we make it relative to actual federal government income, debt service makes up more than 15% of government revenue! 

At the risk of oversimplify all of this, let's put this into perspective for an average consumer:

• National debt is akin to a person that is making $100,000 per year having a credit card balance of more than $764,000 and spending habits equal to $138,000 per year!  (That’s simply taking the national debt as a multiple of federal revenue sources in FY23 and FY23 spending as a multiple of receipts.) 

If you'd like to see the numbers yourself, you can find most of this data at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/