I am a bored corporate accountant who has been following the debt/deficit issue personally for nearly a decade. A few years back, looking for a better understanding of the US deficit, I stumbled across the Daily Treasury Statement, which is essentially a daily cash flow statement for the US ...more

I am a bored corporate accountant who has been following the debt/deficit issue personally for nearly a decade. A few years back, looking for a better understanding of the US deficit, I stumbled across the Daily Treasury Statement, which is essentially a daily cash flow statement for the US government. It took about a month to decode and decipher, but once I had it figured out, I realized that it was a goldmine of information. I extracted the data from the published PDF files and built a database of DTS data going back to 1998. It took a while, but I got it finished just in time to start my own blog (UsDailyDeficit.com) right as the fiscal cliff/debt limit debate started heating up. With the database, I have the data and tools to essentially live blog the deficit on a day to day basis, analyze and project trends, and report on the deficit from a perspective that has never been touched before…from a cash flow perspective uncorrupted by the shady accounting practices traditionally employed by our government.less