This is clearly unpossible, but according to reports, the Treasury is saying that the deficit for August of this year is 13% lower than that of the August of last year, and 8% lower than the first 11 months of the current fiscal year over the prior matching period..
Suggested explanations are mainly based on increased tax receipts. Bizarrely, although US media and political discourse seems to never talk about the revenue side of deficit calculations, the US Treasury has stubbornly resisted abandoning math.
Keith Olbermann went into this on Countdown today, which prompted me to check into it.
The same report [apparently I missed this by hurrying too much] shows that for the first 11 months of the fiscal year, the deficit is 8% lower. [H/T DallasDoc.]
This might seem to be an important thing to talk about given how much time the fake deficit hawks and Teahadists scream about how all the bad things in the Universe are caused when Democratic Presidents have deficits. (Clinton's surpluses don't count because Newt Gingrich did that. No, really, that's what they say.)
Bloomberg leads with a clear report.
Budget Deficit in U.S. Narrows 13% to $90.5 Billion on Rising Tax Receipts
Bob Willis | Bloomberg | Sep 13
The U.S. government posted a smaller budget deficit in August compared with the same month last year, helped by rising tax receipts.
The excess of spending over revenue totaled $90.5 billion last month, smaller than the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and down 13 percent from $103.6 billion in August 2009, according to a Treasury Department report issued today in Washington. The gap for the fiscal year that started in October was $1.26 trillion compared with $1.37 trillion last year at the same time.
The economic recovery has helped generate more tax revenue for the Treasury, even as the Congressional Budget Office forecasts the deficit this fiscal year will reach $1.34 trillion, the second-largest on record...
Excerpt. Follow link for complete story.
13% lower than the same time last year. I'm not presuming what the trend will be, but given the newsbark cycle, it's worth pointing out.
That fiscal year comparison again:
The deficit is nearly $1.3 trillion in the first 11 months of the fiscal year, the Treasury report also showed Monday. That's $111 billion or 8% lower than the same period in fiscal 2009.
Fox Business seemed to have covered this story. FoxNooz apparently hasn't heard of this news from its sister news agency, since the latest article they have on deficit-related news has to do with the deficit in Greece.
I am not a deficit hawk, nor do I play one for purposes of right wing talk radio. I do not think it is a major economic factor we should be prioritizing. Rather, I think we need to focus as much as possible on using our resources for our nation to get as many people as possible back to work and building the best sort of infrastructure to perhaps lead to a better path down the road.
That said, as much freakout Obama=Hitler screaming we got this year about how Obama was the first President ever to invent the deficit and soon the Chinese would come and kill us all, it might be worth mentioning by Democrats and liberals that even by deficit measures Democratic policies appear to be doing better than Republican policies.