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The conventional wisdom has long held that the Republican Party is the party that cares about deficit reduction and balanced budgets. Those assumptions have been spectacularly wrong, at least over the last several decades.
In fact, we’re occasionally reminded that Republicans don’t much care about deficits, and the party often barely bothers to maintain the pretense. The New Republic had a report yesterday that stood out for me:
Republicans have said they want to reduce government spending and increase U.S. revenue — but not if it inconveniences rich people, apparently. When a reporter asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if he would consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans, he answered with a short “No” before the question was even finished. Republicans standing around him groaned and shook their heads.
To be sure, asking the wealthy to pay a little more would bring the budget closer to balance. It’s also a sound economic idea that enjoys broad public support in recent national polling.
But it’s also an approach GOP leaders dismiss reflexively as out of the question. To paraphrase Meatloaf, Republicans would do anything for fiscal responsibility, but they won’t ask the wealthy to give up some of the ineffective tax breaks the party threw their way.
The idea that GOP leaders are eager to embrace, however, are new work requirements for beneficiaries of social insurance programs — an idea that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would only save about $1 billion per year. To be sure, to you and me, $1 billion might seem like a staggering sum, but when we’re talking about recent budget deficits of $1 trillion, $1 billion is practically a rounding error.
But if new work requirements would do effectively nothing to balance the budget, why are they a top priority for the Republican leadership? Because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his partners are far more concerned about scratching an ideological itch than the deficit they occasionally pretend to care about.
There’s plenty of other related evidence from the GOP’s ongoing debt ceiling fight, including the fact that the party’s ransom note tries to slash investments in the Internal Revenue Service — a move that would make the deficit considerably larger, not smaller.
It was also this week that the CBO told lawmakers that extending Trump-era tax breaks would cost $3.5 trillion. A party concerned about balancing the budget would see this price tag and immediately abandon plans to make the tax cuts permanent, right? Don’t be silly: Republicans are desperate to protect the ineffective tax breaks anyway.
As Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Bernstein summarized this week, “[A]nyone who thinks that Republicans care about federal budget deficits — at all — is just gullible beyond belief.”
That’s true, and it’s been true for quite a while.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, it was in the early 1980s when the GOP made the transition in earnest from an anti-deficit party to an anti-tax party. Ronald Reagan, after running on an anti-deficit platform, racked up massive deficits — which, at the time, were some of the largest in American history relative to the size of the economy.
When Bill Clinton became president, Republicans at least pretended to care about balanced budgets, a position the GOP conveniently abandoned once George W. Bush was in the White House. As president, Bush and his Republican allies thought the responsible thing to do would be to put tax breaks, two wars, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card, without any meaningful effort to pay for any of it. As then-Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared, “Deficits don’t matter.”
Reflecting on the era, the late Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, following several decades on Capitol Hill, told The Associated Press in 2009 that “it was standard practice not to pay for things” during the Bush/Cheney era — as if the entirety of the GOP simply forgot its fiscal principles for eight consecutive years.
Wouldn’t you know it, Republicans magically remembered those principles after Barack Obama was elected, at which point GOP officials once again insisted that nothing mattered more than deficit reduction.
That is, until Donald Trump was elected. Republicans, right on cue, kept the pattern going and decided they couldn’t care less about balancing the budget. Trump — who, like Reagan, promised voters he knew what to do about shrinking the debt — ended up adding nearly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in just one term, and most of that total was racked up before the Covid crisis.
In 2019, the Republican’s White House chief of staff privately conceded that “nobody cares” about fiscal debates anymore, and a year later, shortly before the pandemic, Trump himself explicitly told donors he was indifferent toward the deficit. “Who the hell cares about the budget?” Trump said at the time.
The pattern is tough to miss: For the past four decades, every Republican president has left office with a larger budget deficit than when he started, and every Democratic president has left office with a smaller budget deficit than when he started.
Right around the time of Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, GOP officials began to insist that this time, they truly, deeply care about balanced budgets, culminating in another Republican debt ceiling crisis.
But even as it unfolds, Republicans have ruled out the possibility of rolling back ineffective tax breaks for the wealthy, ruled out cuts to much of the federal budget, and prioritized partisan goals that have little if anything to do with fiscal responsibility.
They are not to be taken seriously. The conventional wisdom on this issue is neither conventional nor wise.
This post revises our related earlier coverage.