On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for October. It's a look back at the good old days of Fiscal Year 2009, with all the spending, and borrowing and loss of revenue...wait, did I say "good old days?" Let's examine CBO's goodbye to the not-so-great fiscal year that was.

CBO tells us that the federal government recorded a total budget deficit of $1.4 trillion last fiscal year, which we have known for quite some time. This total is about $960 billion more than the deficit incurred in 2008. More alarmingly, at least to those easily scared by such numbers, the deficit rose as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 9.9 percent – an increase of 6.8 percent. This is the highest percentage of debt to GDP since 1945.

As I have stated in previous posts, this should not be of great concern right now. We have a high deficit for several reasons, including a precipitous decline in revenues – as people weren't making as much money in the recession as they had been before the downturn – and a steep increase in government spending, most of which entailed the government attempting to fill in for the lack of spending by those lower-earning individuals and states.

The report has a wonderful graph depicting these two trends:

Not to worry you anymore, but the CBO's estimate for the first month of Fiscal Year 2010 – based on the Monthly Treasury Statement for September and the Daily Treasury Statements for October – shows that these trends are going to continue into the near future:

CBO estimates that the government recorded a deficit of $175 billion in October, about $19 billion more than the shortfall recorded in the same month last year. Revenues were $29 billion, or 18 percent, lower than they were last October; most of that decline stemmed from reductions in withheld individual income and payroll taxes resulting from continued economic weakness and the revenue-reducing provisions of ARRA.

Read the rest of the CBO report to soak up all the dismal estimates, budget totals, and receipts and outlays you can get your hands on.

Image by Flickr user johnsolid used under a Creative Commons license.