The Republicans have been screaming that President Obama “exploded” the deficit. Yeah, not so fast there, pal.

The U.S. government posted a smaller budget deficit in August compared with the same month last year, helped by rising tax receipts.

The excess of spending over revenue totaled $90.5 billion last month, smaller than the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and down 13 percent from $103.6 billion in August 2009, according to a Treasury Department report issued today in Washington. The gap for the fiscal year that started in October was $1.26 trillion compared with $1.37 trillion last year at the same time.

It’s still big, but it’s not an explosion, either, when it heads down.

By the way, the budget for FY 2009 was the work of — wait for it — the Bush administration.