The cash balance in the governments account dropped again on Thursday. It started the day with $68.332 billion, had revenues of $210.781 billion and expenditures of $221.773 billion, ending the day with $57.341 billion.

This number is becoming more significant as news emerges that talks on raising the debt ceiling have reached an impasse and discussions have been suspended. Sex offender Donald Trump is not helping.

Negotiations for a deal to raise the US debt ceiling and thereby avoid a default with potentially catastrophic consequences for the world economy reached a worrying impasse on Friday.
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Republican leaders outside the talks sought to apply pressure. Not long before Graves spoke to reporters, Trump said his party should not give ground.

Republicans, the presidential frontrunner wrote on his Truth Social platform, “should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want (including the ‘kitchen sink’). That’s the way the Democrats have always dealt with us. Do not fold!”

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, aimed fire at Biden, accusing the president of “wait[ing] months before agreeing to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy on a spending deal.

“They are the only two who can reach an agreement,” McConnell said. “It is past time for the White House to get serious. Time is of the essence.”

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, countered: “We are in a crisis, for ONE REASON – House Republicans threat to burn down the entire economy if they don’t get their way.”

This is no way to run the world’s largest economy.

The cash balance in the governments account dropped sharply on Wednesday. It started the day with $94.629 billion, had revenues of only $16.310 billion and expenditures of $42.6226 billion, ending the day with $68.332 billion.

This graph shows the steady decline in the cash balance over the past year.

In May of last year, the balance was close to $800 billion and kept steadily dropping with just a few upticks until it reached the current value, which is less than one-tenth of the starting value.

The cash balance in the government’s account rose on Monday. It started the day with just $87.431 billion, had revenues of $174.485 billion and expenditures of $167.288 billion, ending the day with $94.629 billion.

The cash balance in the governments account took a sharp dive on Monday. It started the day with $139.944 billion, had revenues of $156.754 billion and expenditures of $209.267 billion, ending the day with just $87.431 billion.

The debt ceiling has always been a tool for Republicans to force through measures that would otherwise never get legislative approval.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book describes how conservatives in this country and abroad use a crisis — natural disasters and other unexpected calamities — to push through policies that would never win legislative support. What happened was, in the Obama administration, his Republican adversaries realized they could actually plan a crisis by refusing to increase the debt ceiling and then use the shock doctrine to push through their desired policy (spending cuts and, if they can get away with it, tax cuts too).

At the end of day on Thursday, May 11, the amount that the government had in its operating cash account to pay its bills was $143.314 billion. On Friday May 12th, the income was $15.982 billion and the outflow was $19.352 billion, leaving a reduced cash balance at the end of that day of $139.944 billion. As the days go by, the trend line for the closing balance is to keep dropping, though on some days the balance might rise.

The current debt ceiling limit was last raised on December 16, 2021 to $31.4 trillion. If you want to know the value of the US debt down to the last cent, as of May 12th, it was $31,458,532,169,329.81. How can it be larger than the limit by about $58 billion? It is because “under current law, [the Treasury] can take well-established “extraordinary measures” to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling.” But there is a limit to such extraordinary measures. The nominal limit of $31.4 trillion was reached back in January.

I am not sure how low the cash balance has to sink before it becomes a full-fledged crisis. Such a date is known as the ‘X-date’. This article discusses some of the known expenditures to come and who might get paid if the debt ceiling is not raised. But the Biden administration has ruled out paying some bills and not others.
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The deadline is looming for the debt ceiling to be raised to avoid the US government going into some sort of default, never a good thing. The early deadlines have already passed with some accounting devices being used to avoid default so far but June 4th is said to be the final deadline for getting the ceiling raised.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, ostensibly led by speaker Kevin McCarthy but actually by the nutter caucus of the party, have demanded that Joe Biden agree to negotiations on spending cuts before they will raise the ceiling. But Biden has said that while he is willing to negotiate on the budget, he will not do so as part of the debt ceiling. Biden has released his own budget and asked the Republicans to do the same before any negotiations can begin but so far they have not been able to come up with a budget that will satisfy the disparate elements of their caucus, especially the nutters who are now so dominant.

The problem for Republicans is that many of the programs they want to cut are those that the public wants to preserve.
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