Steve Benen makes an observation:
Not only is this year’s deficit on track to be significantly smaller than [last] year’s, to the tune of about $200 billion, it’s also on pace to be even better than optimistic projections from February. Hell, we even ran a surplus in April.
All told, the U.S. federal deficit will be about $600 billion smaller than it was in President Obama’s first year in office, making this the fastest deficit reduction Americans have seen since World War II.
The Republicans might be able to take some share of the credit for these statistics, including that we just experienced the strongest job growth that we’ve seen in eight years. The problem is that the budget deficit is dropping because Obama raised taxes on people making over $400,000 a year. How revenues went up and job growth exploded immediately after taxes were raised on the rich is something that cannot be explained in the Republicans’ world. Raising taxes is supposed to kill jobs and dry up revenue collection.
The truth is, things would be much better if we hadn’t lost so many public sector jobs and if the Sequester wasn’t starving public investment. But John Maynard Keynes was gay, so whatever.
