If you remember the Election of 2006 was filled with promises of restoring fiscal discipline and a “pay-as-you-go” mentality by Democrats who took over Congress. What we have instead is a fiscal year that has opened with a $263.3 Billion Dollar Deficit. How’s that for a campaign platform?

Incase you aren’t keeping score in addition to the Presidency, every member of the House of Representatives is up in 2008 as are many important Senate seats, meaning government officials who are chosing re-election will go home to constituents with quite the record to run on.

For the month of February alone, the government ran a deficit of $175.6 billion, a record for any single month. That was larger than the shortfall of around $170 billion that economists were expecting.

One of the reasons the deficit was running higher was related to a calendar issue, the Congressional Budget Office said. Because March 1 fell on weekend, payments that the government would ordinarily have made in March were instead made at the end of February. That caused spending to be higher in February, contributing to the larger budget deficit.

The White House predicts that the deficit this year will increase to $410 billion, as the economic slowdown cuts into tax revenues. Many analysts predict economic growth will be feeble in the January-to-March quarter; a growing number believe the economy is actually shrinking now. Under one rough rule, the economy would need to contract for six straight months to be considered in a recession.

So far this budget year, the biggest spending categories are programs from the Health and Human Services Department, including Medicare and Medicaid, $292.9 billion; Social Security, $270.5 billion; military, $247.6 billion; and interest on the public debt, $198.5 billion.