President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was a success. The theater was unbeatable. The president’s special guests were particularly moving at this year’s address: a double amputee who somehow escaped from North Korea by sheer strength of will; a police officer who adopted a drug addict’s baby; the families of two girls slain by the criminal gang MS-13.
Trump touted passage of the tax reform bill and his administration’s efforts to unmake the Obama administration’s regulatory state. He called attention to the nefarious North Korean regime and praised Iran’s democratic protesters. And he asked Congress to stop scrimping on the federal government’s chief priority: its military.
Less successful, in our view, were his proposals on immigration and his denunciation of “economic surrender”—or, as we prefer to term it, free trade. But these stem from the president’s campaign commitments and were neither surprising nor as radical as might have been feared.
What was deeply surprising was the president’s failure even to mention the nation’s $20 trillion debt or its nearly $1 trillion deficit. For the leader of America’s party of small government, this was quite a break with tradition—an omission, we fear, indicative of both his and the party’s priorities. The last president who neglected to mention the national debt or the federal deficit in a State of the Union address was Gerald Ford. It was 1976, and the national debt was by any measure a tiny fraction of what it is today.
A year ago, the new president sharply criticized the Obama administration for heedlessly running up the debt. “In the last eight years,” Trump said, “the past administration has put on more new debt than nearly all of the other presidents combined.” This year, the issue was quietly sidestepped. Nor was there any mention of the financial commitments responsible for our debt. No mention of Medi-caid, Medicare, or Social Security.
Instead, the president proposed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan—a proposal three times larger than the one offered by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s plan is nearly double the size of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, the one that flooded states with new money and stimulated nothing but government expansion.
Yet congressional Republicans were blissfully unconcerned—and not just moderate Republicans, but erstwhile Tea Partiers too: “It was an A+ tonight,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. A few brave conservative souls, such as Michigan’s Justin Amash, complained as loudly after Trump’s address as they had during the Obama administration. But most Republicans were too happy that a Republican president had a good night to register any apprehension about a spending proposal that dwarfs our already colossal deficit.
It was not always thus. Back in 2011, remember, Tea Party-aligned members of the House and Senate were willing to stop Congress from raising the debt limit and so precipitate a default on the Treasury’s debt in order to secure promises on reforming entitlements and spending reductions. They were ridiculed by Democrats and some centrist Republicans and by virtually every political commentator outside talk radio. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, hardly a set of welfare-state squishes, dismissed the Tea Partiers as fantasists. Theirs was a brave and principled stand. Yet in 2018, they’re happy to stop worrying and embrace the nation’s coming financial doom.
As the week wore on, some of the deficit hawks did appear to be waking up to what Trump is proposing. “The one thing missing in the president’s State of the Union address was: What are we going to do on the mandatory spending side that continues to be ignored?” Meadows told us after we asked him how he could give the president’s spending plans top marks. The Freedom Caucus has apparently shared its recommendations for mandatory spending reforms with the White House, and Meadows wants them to be considered in any debate about new infrastructure spending. “Without those, getting anywhere close to the $1.5 trillion number the president outlined would be virtually impossible.”
We’re glad to hear it but remain skeptical.
As for the president’s plan, maybe it’s true that our infrastructure is “crumbling” and that the best way to deal with the problem is not for states to alter their spending priorities but for the federal government to spend a mind-numbingly large amount of money. And maybe it’s true, too, that Americans should “reclaim our building heritage” and that we should have “gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways across our land.” Maybe.
But remember: There are two ways to pay for new expenditures, not one. The first is to raise revenue with tax increases, now or in the future. The second is to stop spending money on less important items. It’s an old idea, cutting expenditures—but it works. Perhaps Congress and the White House should consider it.
