But try convincing a Democrat of that.

From the Wall Street Journal:

It turns out the budget deficit news for fiscal 2006 was even better than we previewed in these columns last week. Thanks to a burst of September revenue, Treasury reported yesterday that the deficit fell to $247.7 billion, or 1.9% of GDP, below our report of $260 billion.

A couple of other notable budget facts: Revenues again rose faster than the economy, so tax receipts have now climbed to 18.4% of GDP. That’s higher than in all but 15 years since 1962, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Seven of those years were in the Clinton era, when revenues rose to a postwar high of 20.9% in 2000, thanks in part to the confiscatory tax rates that voters elected to reduce with their Presidential choice that same year. In other words, to the limited extent the deficit remains a problem, it is all about spending, not a lack of revenues. . . .

The Democratic/media criticism that all of this good news is merely “temporary” is beside the point. Of course entitlement spending will rise in the future, but any extra revenues Democrats raised today would be spent today. They surely wouldn’t be saved for somebody’s future retirement. Democrats who continue to moan about the deficit are really saying that the government should take an even larger tax bite from the economy than its currently hefty 18.4%; in other words, they want to raise taxes.

Exactly.

Democrats just don’t seem to grasp the idea that deficits are not caused by tax cuts - not at our current level of taxation anyway - but are rather the result of runaway spending.

As the article indicates (and I’ve pointed out numerous times on this blog), the deficit has been shrinking of late because tax revenues have been increasing thanks to Bush’s tax cuts.  In fact, the deficit has been shrinking despite growth in government spending, meaning that the growth in tax revenue has been so extraordinary that it has actually outpaced government spending.

But that won’t last forever, so the key now is to make some significant cuts to government spending...specifically entitlement spending as that is where our government wastes the most.