The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates.
Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink -- increasing it to more than four times last year's all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.
The unprecedented deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus bill -- as well as a seemingly embedded structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.
Continuing an apparent trend of discussing things in terms of pennies, thanks to the MegaPenny Project for this visual:
(With 1.8 trillion pennies you could build a structure about the size and shape of the Empire State Building. The scale model would weigh 5,683,200 tons.)
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