In May 2009, President Obama released his updated budget estimates, which projected that the federal deficit for fiscal year 2012 would be $557 billion (see table S-1).  The Congressional Budget Office now says that the deficit for fiscal year 2012 (which ended on September 30) was about $1.1 trillion — or about twice what Obama said it would be.  In other words, Obama’s estimate was off by more than half a trillion dollars.

To put this colossal error into perspective, at the time that Obama was elected, the United States had never once had a deficit as large as Obama’s error would prove to be.  Our largest deficit as of November 4, 2008 (the day that Obama beat John McCain) had been $459 billion (see table 1.3).  Since 2008, we’ve now run up more than $1 trillion in deficit spending for four consecutive years, totaling more than $5 trillion (see table 1.3).