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In a recent piece for Politico, National Review’s Rich Lowry highlighted the Republican Party’s “sporadic” commitment to fiscal conservatism.
After a hiatus during the Trump years, Republicans are back in the mood for fiscal probity. It’s very strange not to seriously pursue a deeply held goal when you have unified control of Washington, then to insist on trying to achieve much of it in one fell swoop when you barely have control of one chamber of Congress. But here we are. This is the Republican pattern.
“Strange” may not have been the first adjective that came to mind, but it’ll do.
But it was Lowry’s reference to “the Republican pattern” that stood out for me. The National Review editor emphasized the last two GOP presidential administrations, but to fully appreciate the larger context, I’d recommend looking back a bit further.
It might seem like ancient history, but for much of the 20th century, the Republican Party was a fiercely anti-deficit institution, and its members were relatively sincere on the matter. In fact, when John F. Kennedy proposed significant tax cuts in the early 1960s, he faced opposition from a GOP lawmaker — who questioned whether the country could afford to lower the top bracket from 91% to 65%, especially in light of lingering war-era debts.
The party had not yet made the transition in earnest from an anti-deficit party to an anti-tax party.
That evolution came into sharp relief two decades later, when 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.
A new GOP standard was set, and the party embraced it with great enthusiasm.
That is, until Bill Clinton became president, at which point Republicans at least pretended to care deeply about a balanced budget again. The Democrat generally shared the fiscal goal, and the deficits became large budget surpluses. As Clinton left the White House, the United States was on track to see its national debt shrink considerably.
George W. Bush had other ideas. 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.
Would the GOP reverse course again the moment another Democratic president entered the Oval Office? Of course it would: The pattern held after Joe Biden’s inauguration, and we’re now dealing with a debt ceiling standoff launched by Republicans who insist they truly, deeply care about balanced budgets again.
They are not to be taken seriously.
We’re stuck in a ridiculous conversation in which we’re all supposed to pretend that Republicans genuinely care about deficit reduction and balanced budgets. They’ve already proved that they don’t. If GOP lawmakers were sincere, they could’ve tackled these issues when they controlled the levers of power. Instead, Republicans did the opposite, throwing caution to the wind and ignoring their ostensible principles.
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.
And yet, here we are, watching House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his GOP cohorts declaring earnestly that this time, really and truly, Republicans care about fiscal responsibility. Never mind the last couple of generations — this time, we’re told, they mean it.
Except they don’t. They’ve already ruled out the possibility of rolling back ineffective tax breaks for the wealthy; they’ve also already ruled out cuts to much of the federal budget; and they lack the courage and wherewithal to fill out their own ransom note in the debt ceiling crisis they initiated.
While watching these developments unfold, anyone assuming that Republicans have real credibility on fiscal issues isn’t paying close enough attention.