When something spectacularly awful ticks up temporarily to being “only” really bad, that’s not a reason to celebrate.

Such is the case with the short-term decline in the size of the annual deficits predicted for this year. After two years of $3 trillion deficits, the shortfall in fiscal 2022 is expected to be $1.15 trillion. Even that latter number, though, is so mindbogglingly large and fiscally dangerous that it should frighten us all, not make us sigh in relief. This is especially true because the movement vaguely in the right direction is only a one-time anomaly, not a trend.