President Trump once vowed to drain the swamp, but by joining with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the latest budget deal, he has merely drained it of the Tea Party.
There are many ways in which the Trump presidency has been disruptive to the status quo. But when it comes to spending and deficits, he has restored Washington to a much more conventional place in which both parties agree to ignore warnings of fiscal disaster, and resolve their differences by simply agreeing to spend more money.
The Tea Party was many things to many people, but one way in which it briefly changed politics is that for a period of time, Republican lawmakers were more worried about the consequences of rubber stamping budget deals than they were about being attacked for spending cuts. Though the movement never consolidated control of the government before its influence declined, it had one lasting victory in the form of the 2011 budget agreement to resolve the debt ceiling standoff that modestly restrained spending.
Yet as time went on and Trump was elected president, Republicans decided to stop pretending to care about the debt. They voted several times to blow past spending limits, and now have done so to the tune of another $340 billion. As Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl notes, the latest deal “would essentially repeal the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act and raise the baseline for future discretionary spending by nearly $2 trillion over the decade.”
The waving away of previous spending restraint, it should be noted, has not come because deficits have receded. In fact, just last week, the White House projected that deficits would once again breach $1 trillion in 2019, for the first time since Obama’s first term. What’s remarkable is that this is happening during a strong economy and with interest rates still at historically high levels.
Should investors eventually demand higher interest rates, or should the economy falter — making Americans more dependent on public assistance, leading to federal stimulus, and reducing revenues — deficits will only get much deeper. This is especially true given the tacit agreement of both parties to do nothing to address the crisis facing Medicare and Social Security.
Democrats, in some senses, have an excuse, as they are the party that consistently argues for more government spending. But Republicans, at least when Democrats are in power, like to pretend they are the responsible guardians of the nation’s fiscal future.
Instead, they have given up all pretense. The Freedom Caucus, founded to supposedly represent the Tea Party values of limited government in Congress, has devolved into a PR shop for Trump. Mick Mulvaney, one of the founders of the group, has discounted the importance of deficits as the president’s budget man and chief of staff. And even Rush Limbaugh recently declared that, “Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.”
Trump’s Republican Party may want to dismiss the importance of the debt, but the numbers don’t lie. The nation’s federal debt will surpass unprecedented levels in the coming decades, and neither party even wants to pretend to care about it.
