Xinhua, Washington :
The US federal government registered a budget deficit of about 193.5 billion U.S. dollars in February, the largest monthly imbalance in a year, the U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday.
The federal government raked in a revenue of 144.3 billion dollars last month, an increase from 122.8 billion dollars in February 2013, while spending totaled 337.9 billion dollars, compared with 326.3 billion dollars a year earlier, the department said in a report.
The combined budget deficit in the first five months of the current fiscal year, which ends at the end of September, stood at 377.4 billion dollars, 23.6 percent lower than a year earlier, revealed the monthly budget report.
In its latest estimate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast the deficit would total 514 billion dollars in the current fiscal year, lower than a record high of 1.4 trillion dollars in 2009.
This year’s deficit would equal 3.0 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), close to the average percentage of GDP seen during the past 40 years, according to the CBO projection.
As revenue increased and spending dwindled, the U.S. federal government budget deficit fell to 680 billion dollars for the 2013 fiscal year, the smallest in five years. The combined deficit for fiscal 2013 accounted for 4.1 percent of GDP, representing a reduction of more than half from the ratio in 2009.
