US Feb. revenues soar, but budget deficit hits record $311bn as pandemic costs weigh

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Later this week, the US Treasury Department said in a statement that the US Government had witnessed an extraordinary scale of revenue-surge last month, however, the Government had also clocked a record budget deficit of $311 billion in February, an all-time high for any month in the US history, as a flurry of fiscal stimulus packages alongside outbreak-associated expenses had weighed heavily on the world’s No.

1 economy. Nonetheless, while the US Government had reported a record budget deficit of $311 billion last month, up about $76 billion compared to the same time a year earlier, revenues surged as much as 32 per cent to $248 billion on a year-on-year basis, mostly boosted up by a rise in corporate tax filings as 2021 taxation filings began two weeks later than those in 2020.

Apart from an unprecedented upsurge in corporate taxation, buoyed up by a roughly $2.9 trillion in stimulus packages last year, individual and withheld income taxes had also witnessed a rise of $9 billion on an annualized basis.

US jobless benefit led costs rose to a record high in February

On top of that, while the US Government had reported a 68 per cent rise in budget deficit to a record $1.047 trillion over the first five months of fiscal 2021 that began on October 1, 2020, February expenses on state unemployment benefits alongside health-related costs soared 32 per cent to a record peak of $559 billion compared to the same period a year earlier.

However, back in the fiscal 2010, US Government had posted its previous record deficit of $652 billion in the October-February period.