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| From: | The Washington Post | <email@washingtonpost.com> |
| To: | ||
| Subject: | The Daily 202: The budget deal shows how unserious the GOP is about deficits in the Trump era | |
| Sent: | Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:13:00 +0000 | |
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The budget deal shows how unserious the GOP is about deficits in the Trump era¶
President Trump, accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, visits the Capitol in March for a lunch with the Republican caucus. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)¶
HOHMANN¶
with Mariana Alfaro¶
THE BIG IDEA: Mitch McConnell told President Trump privately last month that no politician has ever lost an election for spending more money. That mind-set – caring more about the next election than the next generation – helps explain why the Senate majority leader and the president endorsed a budget deal last night, which still needs to pass Congress, that will raise spending limits by $320 billion while suspending the federal debt ceiling until after both men’s 2020 reelection fights. It also illustrates how hollow so much of the rhetoric from McConnell, Trump and other Republicans was during Barack Obama’s presidency.¶
Discretionary spending is growing at a faster clip under Trump¶
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than Obama. The budget deficit and the national debt are growing at even more distressing rates, however, because the Republican tax cuts have reduced revenue even more starkly than the dire forecasts. The Trump administration estimates the deficit this fiscal year will top $1 trillion, up from $779 billion last year. It was $587 billion in 2016, Obama’s last full year in office. The national debt was $19 billion when Trump took power and surpassed $22 trillion this month. Even with rock-bottom interest rates, the federal government will pay out more than $350 billion this year to service that debt.¶
If we’re running these kinds of deficits when the economy is supposedly booming, think about how bad they’ll become when a recession arrives and revenues inevitably shrivel. “This agreement is a total abdication of fiscal responsibility by Congress and the president,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “It may end up being the worst budget agreement in our nation’s history, proposed at a time when our fiscal conditions are already precarious.”¶
— There is little, if any, evidence that Trump himself personally cares that the federal balance sheet is drowning in red ink.¶
Undoubtedly, many people who work in the White House – led by acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney – want spending cuts. And these administration officials insist that Trump has told them he wants to make big cuts in 2021 if he wins a second term. But watch what the president does, not what his aides say. Trump also promised before he took office that he’d balance the budget and pay off the entire national debt by the end of a hypothetical second term.¶
Trump, who has referred to himself as “the king of debt,” drove multiple businesses into bankruptcy before becoming the first president in U.S. history with no prior governing or military experience. Earlier in his term, advisers presented him with a chart that projected a hockey stick spike¶
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in the national debt unless major changes are made. Trump shrugged. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” he reportedly said.¶
Lately, the president has been recounting the advice he got from McConnell about spending money to West Wing aides. Two people with direct knowledge confirmed to my colleagues recently that the Kentucky Republican delivered that message during a private phone call last month.¶
— Republican leaders are quick to blame Democrats, noting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi negotiated the deal with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. They say they needed to agree to higher spending levels to get support in the House. That’s true to some degree, of course, but Republicans were also on their borrowing binge when they had unified control of government during the first two years of the Trump presidency. This will forever taint Paul Ryan’s legacy as speaker.¶
To be sure, the Trump administration has proposed steep spending cuts in each of his budget blueprints, and some of the deficit hawks on his staff tried to insist on cuts during this most recent round of negotiations. “Acting budget director Vought sought last week to force Democrats to commit to $150 billion in budget changes in exchange for the new spending, but his demand was rejected. Instead, negotiators agreed to $77 billion in accounting changes that probably wouldn’t constrain any future spending,” Paletta and Erica Werner report in their story on the deal. “But the deal locked in more spending for the military, something Trump has tried to make a hallmark of his first 30 months as president.”¶
But the only thing the president has really gone to the mat for on Capitol Hill – triggering the longest-ever government shutdown – was to get billions in additional spending to build his proposed border wall. When he couldn’t get the money that way, he diverted it from the military construction budget – the legality of which continues to¶
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be challenged in court.¶
Trump on debt ceiling: ‘We can never play with it’¶
— Leaders from both parties touted goodies they got as they tried to sell their members on the bill. “Democrats have always insisted on parity in increases between defense and non-defense, and we are pleased that our increase in non-defense budget authority exceeds the defense number by $10 billion over the next two years,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement. “It also means Democrats secured an increase of more than $100 billion in funding for domestic priorities since President Trump took office.”¶
House Minority Leader McCarthy (R-Calif.) made a contrary claim as he endorsed the deal. “Given that sequestration cut defense spending more than non-defense, we are pleased that the agreement provides $20 billion more for defense than non-defense over two years,” he said in a statement. “While this deal is not perfect, compromise is necessary in divided government.”¶
McConnell emphasized the new spending he got for Kentucky for military installations in his state, citing Fort Knox, Fort Campbell and the Blue Grass Army Depot. Missing from his statement was any mention of the debt or the deficit. “While the reality of divided government means this is not exactly the deal Republicans would have written on our own, it is what we need to keep building on that progress,” he said.¶
— This new deal, assuming it passes before Congress leaves town for the month-long August recess, will end the Budget Control Act, which Obama signed into law after House Republicans pushed the¶
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government to the brink of defaulting on its debt in 2011. “That law, once seen as the Republicans’ crowning achievement in the Obama era, set strict spending caps, enforced with automatic spending cuts,” the New York Times notes. “But since 2014, a succession of budget deals have waived those caps, and the new deal not only lifts them again but also allows the whole law to expire in 2021. And this time around, the approach of the debt limit hardly caused a ripple of consternation about the rising red ink.”¶
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“I’ve seen no evidence that it’s even being discussed,” said Sen. Lankford (R-Okla.). “That’s the hard part for me.”
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“It’s pretty clear that both houses of Congress and both parties have become big spenders, and Congress is no longer concerned about the extent of the budget deficits or the debt they add,” said Club for Growth President McIntosh, a former Republican congressman.
— A few members of the House Freedom Caucus strategized last night about ways to tank this deal, which they see as a betrayal of the tea party principles that they got elected on and warn will “sabotage the fiscal future of our nation.” Freshman Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who was formerly Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief of staff, is circulating a letter around Capitol Hill offices to collect signatures before sending it to the White House. “You should veto this bill because it is fiscally irresponsible,” the letter says, “indulging our national spending addiction.”¶
“Other likely backers include GOP Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Cloud of Texas and Debbie Lesko of Arizona, who, like Roy, are members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus,” Politico reports.¶
“Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FLa.), a top Trump ally on Capitol Hill, is also expected to sign on to the letter.”¶
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Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman who lost reelection last year after Trump endorsed his primary challenger, suggested last week that the growing debt and government spending would be a centerpiece of the long-shot primary challenge that he’s mulling against Trump.¶
— Other fiscal conservatives who don’t need to worry about running for reelection lamented the direction that the GOP has taken under his stewardship. “There are no small government conservatives left in Washington,” tweeted Joe Scarborough, who represented the Florida Panhandle in Congress as a Republican from 1995 to 2001 and now hosts a morning show on MSNBC. “If Newt Gingrich agreed to this deal, we would have run him out of DC on the same day. We balanced the budget four years in a row. These Big Government Republicans are bankrupting us.”¶
Conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson from Georgia noted that his party demands fiscal discipline only when Democrats are in the White House. “This is a bad deal that puts us many steps closer to bankruptcy,” he tweeted. “No leaders in Washington want to restore any fiscal sanity. Why is it always only a [Democrat] in the White House and [Republicans] in Congress that get us fiscal sanity, i.e. [Bill] Clinton balanced budget & sequestration under Obama?”¶
— Social media buzzed about the deal: Nancy Pelosi was spotted negotiating while sitting on a delayed flight:¶
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An editor for the Bulwark, a conservative publication, noted how Trump has changed his tune entirely on the debt ceiling:¶
Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) criticized the deal by sharing a GIF of the Joker lighting a pile of money on fire from the 2008 Batman movie “The Dark Knight.” In the scene, the Joker says: “All you care about is money. This town deserves a better class of criminal. And I’m going to give it to them.”¶
Cruz, who has already abandoned in the Trump era several of what he used to call his core principles, refused to talk about the deal when approached by CNN:¶
There was also criticism from the left:¶
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