Five Straight Years of Trillion Dollar Deficits

It's official. The United States has posted trillion dollar deficits for five years in a row now. We've heard for years that America is "approaching" a fiscal cliff, but with these numbers, it's fair to say we're already over the fiscal cliff, now it just depends how hard we hit the ground. The Democratic controlled Senate has refused to even introduce a budget for more than 1100 days and of course when you don't have a budget, you don't know how much you should be spending. These kinds of deficits also slow down the economy.

By the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2012, the new debt accumulated in this fiscal year by the federal government had already exceeded $1 trillion, making this fiscal year the fifth straight in which the federal government has increased its debt by more than a trillion dollars, according to official debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury.