Um..., About that Crippling Budget Deficit

Hey, you! Yes you..., you budget hawk. The guy who kept telling me that Bush's tax cuts and Congressional spending had created a huge and out of control deficit that would ruin the economy.

Well, once again we have good news on the deficit front.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal deficit is running sharply lower than last year even though spending in August set an all-time high, the government reported Thursday.

The Treasury Department said that the deficit through the first 11 months of this budget year totaled $274.4 billion, down 9.8 percent from the same period a year ago.

Analysts believe the deficit for all of 2007 will actually be even lower because they are forecasting a sizable surplus in the final month....

Got that? Well, then, how about this?

The Congressional Budget Office is forecasting that when this budget year wraps up on Sept. 30, the deficit will total $158 billion, down by 36.2 percent from last year's $248.2 billion deficit.

The government's books have been helped this year by record flows of tax receipts, which have continued even though economic growth has been reduced by a serious slump in housing.

And this,

The administration is projecting that the government's books will be in surplus by 2012 if Congress follows Bush's recommendations on spending restraint.

Read it here.

Gee..., yet another apocalypse that hasn't happened and isn't going to.

What is it about today's political culture that induces normally intelligent people to invest themselves in all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios -- economic, military, environmental, cultural catastrophes --- that never pan out? Could the media have something to do with it?