2024 was the year when the runaway US budget deficit was supposed to gradually normalize, and after two crisis-years, the US was supposed to end its drunken sailor spending ways. And for a while there, it seemed touch and go, with the cumulative US deficit initially overtaking 2023 - forget about the batshit insane 2021 and 2022 when the deficit hit a mindboglilng 18% of GDP...

... before slowly easing back for a few months, only to sprint ahead  of 2023 once more in August...

... when THIS happened: an August budget deficit of a staggering $380 billion, up more than 50% from the $243 billion in July, and up more than 55% from July, and up 66% from last August... oh, and almost $100 billion more than the median estimate of $292.5 billion, which may be why the Treasury quietly snuck the number out by leaking it after 5am ET when everyone was sleeping, not at its regular time of 2pm ET.

That's right, in a year when the monthly budget deficit was meandering along in the merry Chernobyl way, not great, not terrible, someone in the BIden admin had the brilliant idea to spend a metric asston of money to reboot the economy so we don't get a recession just in time for the elections, and sure enough, government spending went into absolutely epic overdrive, as outlays hit a mindblowing $686 billion, the highest since March 2023, and only a handful of crisis months during the covid crash saw greater government spending in any given month.

Here is another way to show the data: smoothing out for outlier months, by presenting the 6 month moving average: well, it just hit the highest... since covid!