Thank heavens for Ctrl+F, a reader’s best friend in times of memory lapse and abject laziness. While scouring a transcript of about 19,000 words, it’s also a legitimate research tool—particularly when the researcher has a hunch that the word he’s looking for isn’t mentioned too often.
Ctrl+F, budget: 10 matches.
Spending: six matches. Debt: four matches. Deficit: 0 matches.
Thursday night’s Republican primary debate treated fiscal policy with the same disinterest the issue has received all campaign. In the brief and infrequent moments it was even acknowledged, the moderators guided the discussion away from its most pressing aspects. Take midway through the forum, when co-moderator Bret Baier introduced a section on the subject of “federal spending”. He nudged the recipient of his first question, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, to avoid the topic of federal entitlement programs.
“Gov. Christie, you talk a lot about entitlement reform and you say that that’s where the federal government can get savings needed to balance the budget. But can you name even one thing that the federal government does now that it should not do at all?” Baier asked.
Ctrl+F, entitlement: one match.
The other GOP debates have only touched on these matters, as well. FiveThirtyEight found that the word “debt” was mentioned nearly half as much, on average, during the first five debates this election than the 20 debates during the 2012 campaign. (The same sort of decline has occurred in the House of Representatives and Senate, with appearances of these keywords in the Congressional Record dropping sharply from 2011 to last year.)
This mirrors developments on the campaign trail. 2016 has been animated by Donald Trump, who has pledged not to fuss with Medicare and Social Security one iota. It has been driven by immigration, an issue that Trump helped bring to the foreground of the campaign, and one that has been a dangerous wedge between Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The most notable spending in Washington to occur during the campaign was the passage of a massive $1.1 trillion package in December. Yet it received 316 votes in the House, a striking development given that chamber’s past intransigence on spending matters and the influence of Tea Party members.
The Congressional Budget Office reported earlier this week that the federal budget deficit will increase for the first time in seven years. Although it isn’t attributable to the drivers of spending that Christie and other fiscal hawks discuss most, those drivers remain responsible for the country’s ominous long-term budget outlook. “[T]he aging of the population and rising health care costs” continue to be the expected causes of booming shortfalls in the coming decades.
Given that Republicans hitched a ride to Washington on the spending concerns of the GOP base only five short years ago, it follows that fiscal policy would still be a major worry among voters. But much of the electoral energy then was attributable to the stimulus, bailouts and Obamacare. And as THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Matthew Continetti wrote in 2012, the Tea Party was never a single-issue movement.
“What motivates the Tea Party, then, is a sense of loss, a feeling that America has come unmoored from her political and moral inheritance and is in danger of seeing it disappear entirely,” he wrote.
“Tea Partiers are less concerned with the size of government than with its character.”
It is for that reason, perhaps, that the words “Donald Trump” are the ones for which everyone is searching at the moment.
