Millard Grimes: Good news nobody talks about

Don't speak a word to anyone about this. You will only be met with blank stares and dismay and perhaps even ridicule. The reaction will be somewhere to a six-year-old who has been told that there is no Santa Claus.

What is the subject that is so sacrosanct? It's the national deficit. You remember the national deficit? It was going to destroy the nation. That was the most talked about disaster a few years ago, yet not a single Republican candidate for president mentioned it in the debate Thursday night.

But the deficit is a bipartisan taboo. Democrats seldom talk about it, including President Obama and Democratic prospects for president.

So here's the news. According to Goldman Sachs, the national deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015 will be the lowest since 2007, the year the financial crisis caused the government to pledge $800 billion to bail out bankrupt banks, the largest U.S. insurance company, General Motors and various other companies considered essential to keeping the U.S. from going into an economic depression.

After some hesitation, Congress voted to come up with the money, which caused the deficit for the year to reach $1.4 billion in that fiscal year, the largest peacetime deficit in history, at 11.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, both alarming totals. This ignited the hysteria over deficits that resulted in several government shutdowns.

But the alarm apparently worked, as the new projection indicates, although it has been scarcely reported.

In fact, the deficit has declined every year since then.

So, why has the deficit dropped so dramatically in the past eight years? It is not because the Obama administration went on an austerity kick. It's mainly because of higher government receipts, also known as taxes, which is another word that neither political party likes to mention.

According to the Goldman Sachs report - and Goldman Sachs is not exactly a left-wing group - most of the improvement in the deficit has resulted from additional income from non-withheld income taxes and corporate income taxes, both of which were bolstered by higher profits for either corporations or individuals. Payroll tax income is also up about 6 percent.

The modest growth in the economy has caused most of the increase in income, not cuts in spending. Nor were the deficits early in the period entirely to be attributed to a drop in tax income: 2008 was simply a year of exceptional outgo, and a lot of that money has been paid back to the government with some interest during the past few years.

Obama deserves more credit than he gets, and so does the relatively tight-fisted Congress. The result has been a more stable economic situation for the U.S., but has not produced an economic boom which often has followed a period of decline such as the Great Recession.

A real recovery will require more spending and probably a higher deficit, plus an enthusiastic admission that the budget deficit is not only much reduced but is about average for the U.S. for most of its existence.

Millard Grimes, editor of the Columbus Enquirer from 1961-69 and founder of the Phenix Citizen. is author of "The Last Linotype: The Story of Georgia and Its Newspapers Since World War II." A profile of Grimes can be found in the Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org.

This story was originally published August 10, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Millard Grimes: Good news nobody talks about ."