Republicans Have Finally Been Revealed as the Party of Fiscal Ruin

[EasyAce]

As Paul Ryan exits, a new CBO report confirms the extent of the GOP's damage to the nation’s budget.
By Peter Suderman
http://reason.com/blog/2018/04/11/republicans-have-finally-been-revealed-a

. . . The annual deficit is now racing toward $1 trillion. According to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office, over the next decade, deficits will total about $1.8 trillion more than if the tax law had not been passed. If anything, that undercounts the damage. The tax law's individual rate reductions all expire within the decade. Republicans, including Paul Ryan, have said they would like those cuts to be made permanent, and it is hard to imagine that a future Congress will really let them expire. If that were to happen, the deficit increase would balloon by a further $722 billion.

By 2028, the CBO now projects that the national debt will nearly equal the country's entire gross domestic product. The report contextualizes this figure by noting that it is an amount "far greater than the debt in any year since just after World War II." Republicans have set the debt on a trajectory that has little historical precedent.

The $1.3 trillion spending bill that congressional Republicans passed earlier, meanwhile, added $400 billion in new spending over the next two years, breaking the spending caps that were put in place under the previous administration. Its increases were roughly split between domestic and defense, and it ended up funding many Obama-era priorities. As with the temporary tax reductions, the two year increase is likely to have permanent ripple effects, as it's unlikely that Congress will suddenly return to lower spending levels . . .

. . .  President Trump, meanwhile, has made the hands-off commitment explicit, promising over and over again not to touch entitlements. Trump's position was just an admission of the position that Republicans, practically speaking, already held.

The deficit estimates that have accompanied tax law and the spending deal do not suggest that the GOP under Trump has not undergone some unexpected personality shift. Even if some members would have preferred a different outcome, the effect of unified Republican rule has been to confirm the party's true priorities. Paul Ryan, for example, is not disappointed by the course the party has taken during his tenure. "I will leave incredibly proud of what we have accomplished," he said this morning, citing the deficit-hiking tax law as a "lasting victory." This is the GOP's essential nature. Republicans didn't lose the mantle of fiscal responsibility. They never had it in the first place.

[INVAR]

Yup.  The Republican Party owns the Democrat agenda in full.

ObamaCare.  Funding Planned Parenthood. Crafting trillion-dollar deficit omnibus spending bills in secret and not providing anyone time to read those multi-thousand page bills before voting  to pass them.

We might as well left Pelosi in power and let Hillary take the throne.  At least they would own their own agenda. 

Now the Republican party shares in the implementation of Socialist Statism, same as the Democrats.

Which is why it is time to dump them altogether and start over somewhere else with a different party for Conservatives.

There is no redeeming or fixing the Republican Party.  They are as corrupt and evil as the Democrats, they just have slightly different views on managing Statism.

[RoosGirl]

Huh, someone else finally noticed.