The Washington Post ran a good article on the tax cuts and the deficit yesterday- lots of interesting quotes from credible folks with different opinions. Here's a great quote on the forces driving the lower deficit:

The President is mighty proud of the new deficit numbers. In fact, he called a press conference to say that the tax cuts he pushed have generated the surge in revenue that's partly responsible for the lower deficit this year. Hmmmmm. Well, corporate profits have gone way up, it's true. And he did cut taxes on corporate profits. There's a correlation there, for sure.

To follow up on Matt's discussion below of the final deficit figures for FY2006, I thought I'd point to some of the wildly disparate explanations offered for it. Says Speaker Hastert, whose credibility right now is not exactly at an all-time high: "Republicans have cut the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule because they know that tax relief fuels America's economy." President Bush added a corollary last night: "Do we keep taxes low so we can keep this economy growing, or do we let the Democrats in Washington raise taxes and hurt the economic vitality of this country?"

The final CBO FY 2006 deficit estimate numbs are in … at a cool quarter of a trillion dollars. The $250 billion figure released today is well under CBO’s estimate of $337 billion at the beginning of the year and the $318 billion actual deficit for FY2005. Until this summer, the deficit projections were uniformly in the $300 billion-range, but a late surge in corporate income helped boost FY2006 revenues by $253 billion over last year’s total.