The budget deficit is shrinking faster than at any time since World War II

It's still huge, but this year alone it fell by $210 billion.

With the fiscal cliff spurring all this talk of deficit reduction in the US, you might think the government hasn’t been reducing the deficits it accumulated fighting the 2008 recession, not to mention the two wars of the last decade and the costs incurred by the country’s structural imbalance between revenue and spending. But you’d be wrong.