I’d like to hope that the editors at the New Republic are feeling a bit less smug today with the Congressional Budget Office’s announcement that the fiscal year 2006 deficit will be $260 billion, down from $318 billion last year. But I won’t, since smugness seems to be the editorial disposition at TNR these days. They’ll just cling to the CBO’s claim that the deficit will rise next year.
That’s not a wise strategy though. Using data from various CBO reports, I constructed this table on projected and actual deficits and income taxes (it is the growth in income taxes that has accounted for a large part of the decline in the deficit).
| CBO Projections Vs. Actual Numbers |
