Republicans are going to have to drop the 'fiscal conservative' act pretty soon

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Republicans are going to have to drop the 'fiscal conservative' act pretty soon

Linette Lopez
 
It already seems as if President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are getting ready to make a major reversal on the kind of budget they promised to deliver to Congress.

Instead of delivering something "revenue-neutral" that wouldn't add to the deficit — the kind of fiscally responsible budget the GOP has been railing about for years — we're in line to get a deficit exploder.

How do we know? Because hard-line Republicans are already throwing out the idea that we need to have a balanced budget.

"So, tax reform and lowering taxes, you know, will create and generate more income," Rep. Mark Meadows, the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said on Sunday. "And so we're looking at those, where the fine balance is. But does it have to be fully offset? My personal response is 'no.'"

You heard that right. The fiscally responsible hard-liner just gave the go-ahead for a spending spree.

Deals are hard, all kinds of deals

Now, from the sound of it, this will happen for the same reason the Republican attempt to overhaul the US healthcare system failed — because it's hard to pass legislation. At least, that's what the Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said on NBC's  "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"What happened was that Washington won," he said. "Washington is a lot more broken than Trump thought it was."

He continued: "We haven't been able to change Washington in the first 65 days. And I think if there's anything that's disappointing and sort of an educational process to the Trump administration, was that this place was a lot more rotten than we thought that it was."

 And of course, we know that without the $1 trillion in entitlement cuts that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare, would've provided, the whole revenue-neutral thing was going to be harder to achieve anyway. Perhaps that's what Meadows was acknowledging, but — either way — it's too late to get that budget cut back.

So here we are, exactly where we've been before.

 David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's budget director, complained that he was never able to cut as much from the budget as he needed to make it balanced because of Washington's horse trading. That was during a period when Republicans and Democrats actually talked to each other. Reagan's administration ended up exploding the deficit as well as the size of the federal government.

Ultimately Stockman came to believe that there were "no real conservatives" when it came to fiscal responsibility in Washington, and if Meadows was being honest on Sunday, Stockman's words still ring true.

That leaves us with a bunch of Republicans who really like tax cuts and are just so-so on fiscal conservatism.

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http://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-will-show-theyre-not-fiscal-conservatives-2017-3