How GOP Fiscal Sanity Died, in 7 Easy Steps

[EasyAce]

Here are the moments when Republicans, including professed deficit hawks, snuffed out the 2009-2014 flicker of budgetary sanity
By Matt Welch
http://reason.com/blog/2018/02/10/how-gop-fiscal-sanity-died-in-7-easy-ste/print

"I ran for office because I was very critical of President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits," a rightly outraged Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Thursday. "Now we have Republicans hand in hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I can't in all honesty look the other way." Now more than ever, Rand stands nearly alone.

The

turnabout in fiscal approach just since Paul's 2010 Tea Party wave election is enough to snap vertebrae. "Republicans repeal the Tea Party," ran the headline of Philip Klein's Washington Examiner piece, and it's hard to argue with his logic: "Despite many setbacks, the Tea Party had one tangible achievement to show for all of the havoc it caused: the enactment of spending caps that resulted from the 2011 standoff over raising the debt ceiling….In 2017, for the first time in the post-Tea Party era, Republicans finally gained unified control of government….They have now agreed on a deal with Democrats that would blow up the spending caps that were a legacy of the Tea Party movement—to the tune of $300 billion over the next two years."

When the first Tea Party senators and congressmen were sworn in, Washington was already filled with urgent talk of deficit reduction, spending restraints, and long-term entitlement reform. Yet eight years and $10 trillion of debt later, precisely none of that is on the table anymore from either major political party. So what the hell happened?

. . . [T]here were many missteps taken by Republicans, including hardcore Tea Party fiscal conservatives, that led us to a point where a GOP Congress and president signed a deal that the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates could add more than $2 trillion in debt over the next decade . . .

. . . 1) December 2010: Rejecting Simpson/Bowles . . .

2) May 2012: Choosing Mitt Romney . . .

3) May 2013: Walking away from bicameral budget negotiations . . .

4) February 2014: Waving away the debt ceiling . . .

5) April 2016: Choosing Donald Trump . . .

6) April 2017: Failing to pass a budget . . .

7) October 2017: Agreeing on $1.5 trillion in new deficits . . .