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WASHINGTON, Mar 11 (Xinhua): The US government's budget deficit hit a monthly record of 119.2 billion dollars in February, the Treasury Department said Friday in its budget report.
The February deficit came after the federal budget registered a monthly surplus in the two previous months.
In February, the government's spending jumped to a record of 232.1 billion dollars while government revenue totaled 112.9 billion dollars, up by 11.8 per cent from the same month of 2005.
For the first five months of the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 2005, government revenues totaled 873.1 billion dollars, a rise of 10.5 per cent over the same period of last year.
Government outlays during this period-totaled 1.09 trillion dollars. That was up 7.6 per cent from the same period a year ago.
During the first five months, the government's budget deficit totaled 217.6 billion dollars. That represented an improvement of 2.6 per cent over the deficit of 223.4 billion dollars recorded in the same period of last year.
For all of last year, the budget deficit totaled 319 billion dollars, the third largest on record.
At present, the Bush administration forecast that the budget deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2006, would reach 423 billion dollars, setting a new record. The old record of 413 billion dollars was set in 2004.
But the Congressional Budget Office has recently predicted that the U.S. budget deficit for the current fiscal year would total 371 billion dollars, up from its earlier estimate of 337 billion dollars but much less than the administration's forecast.
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