Kind Of A Good Thing

The Federal Deficit is coming down in an OK way.

I dunno if that's Damning By Faint Praise or Praising By Faint Damnation.  Feel free to flip a coin on that one, or just blow it all off and walk away.

Not all that long ago, Repubs were wailing about Trillion-Dollar Deficits and how horrible everything was about to get, etc.  New CBO numbers are out now, and the deficit continues to shrink.

From CBO's website:

The federal government ran a budget deficit of $489 billion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2013 (that is, from October 2012 through April 2013), according to CBO’s estimates. That amount is $231 billion less than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year, primarily because revenue collections have been much greater than they were at this point in 2012. In contrast, federal spending so far this year has been slightly lower than what it was last year at this time.

The deficit still annualizes to around $600-800 Billion for the year, but down is down, and that's mostly good.  I say 'mostly' because The KrugMan reminds us that while the Revenue Side is looking better, we still have a problem with the Spending Side because we're actually not spending near enough - which of course, is exactly the opposite of what the Repubs want us to believe.

We're still stuck in this weird Deleveraging Loop - demand is low because people aren't making/borrowing the money they need to buy a lot of stuff, which means the producers aren't making a lot of stuff; which means they don't need to hire a lot of workers; which means people have less to spend on stuff etc.  And as Governments at state & local levels are hemmed in by Balanced Budget requirements (mostly driven by 'conservative' politicians) and in some cases burdened by enormous debt thanks to the sucker loans they got sold during the Bubble, they're cutting spending, which further reduces demand - and on and on and on it goes.

And so anyway, since the Repubs aren't giving up on the whole Austerity thing any time soon, and since Regular People continue trying to dump debt and nobody's really borrowing much at all, we're nowhere near outa the woods yet.

One interesting by-the-by: Simpson-Bowles warned us that we'd be in a full-blown fiscal crisis within two years if we didn't immediately adopt their plan, and - uhm, that was like 26 months ago.  OK OK; we're not exactly livin' the high life, but c'mon.

That damned Kenyan Commie Usurper keeps gettin' shit to work just to make us Repubs look bad - and you know that's all it is.  If he wasn't such a vile back-stabbin' socialist phony, this whole joint'd be in the shitter just like we said it would.  Fuckin' Obama.