Debt and Loving It, Fiscal Year 2012 Edition

Trillion dollar budget deficit, here we come…again. According to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government racked up a $780 billion deficit during the first half of the 2012 fiscal year—yet another reminder that the feds are well on the way to another fiscal gap that well exceeds the $1 trillion mark; CBO projects that this year the deficit will hit $1.2 trillion.

If there's good news, it's that the deficit during the same time-frame last year was slightly larger, by about $53 billion. This time around, the federal government spent slightly less on a few programs and took in slightly more in corporate tax revenues. But given the scale of the deficits Washington has been running for the last few years, and the trillions in debt that federal policymakers have piled on in the process, this hardly counts as a significant improvement. We moved an inch when we needed to move a mile.