Latest GOP Political Theater: Pretending to Care About Deficits

Republicans like to pretend they are the party of fiscal restraint: limited government, moderate spending. And to a large extent, the public believes it. Poll after poll, Republicans get higher marks on “dealing with the deficit.” Josef Goebbels (and Karl Rove) were right: if you repeat it often enough, you don’t even have to pretend to do it; people will believe you.

In actuality, the last Republican president who practiced fiscal restraint was Dwight Eisenhower. It’s been more than 60 years since he was president. Just like there are NO Republican judges that really believe in judicial restraint, deference to tradition, deference to the legislature, and other ridiculous lies they tell to get confirmed (different topic, ask me some other time), Scott Perry, John Joyce, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Green, and the rest of the party are fiscal incendiaries. On this, the MAGA wing and the “moderate” wing are of one mind. There are no moderates and there are no “deficit hawks.”

Budget numbers clearly show: Republican presidents expand annual deficits, by an average of more than 300% each presidential term. Equally clear, Democratic presidents reduce the deficit, by an average of about 50% per term.

President/Inaug date	Inherited Deficit	Final deficit	Change $/%	FYs on president
Reagan 1981	-$79B	-$153B	$74B/94%	FY 82-89
Bush 1989	-$153B	-$255B	$102B/67%	FY 90-93
Clinton 1993	$255B	+128B	$383B/-150%	FY 94-2001
Bush 2001	$128B	-$1,413B	$1,541B/1,204%	FY 2002-2009
Obama 2009	$1,413B	$665B	$748B/-53%	FY 10-17
Trump 2017	-$665B	-$2,776B	$2,107B/317%	FY 18-21
Biden 2021	$2,776B	~$1,400B	~$1,400B/-~50%	FY 22

There’s an even more dramatic number. Since Reagan, over a span of more than 40 years, NO Republican president has EVER seen a single annual deficit smaller than the one he inherited from his predecessor.  Read that again. For the last 40+ years, the safest bet in Washington has been this: if you’re watching a Republican take the oath of office from the Chief Justice, you KNOW as long as he’s president, the deficit will never be lower than it is today. And by the end of Biden’s (first) term, in 20 years of Democrats in the White House, no Democratic president has EVER seen a deficit larger than the one he inherited. The second safest bet is: if it’s a Democrat, there is a 100% chance that the deficit will ALWAYS be lower than it is today – until the next Republican president comes along and increases the deficit again.

There hasn’t been a single annual exception to this rule.

This statistic surprised me when I first noticed it, during Bush, Jr’s. first term. It was surprising enough when the data encompassed 22 years and 4 presidents. Now that it’s 44 years (at the end of the current presidential term) and seven presidents, with still no exceptions, that seems to be baked in to our system.

Some Republicans grumble that “well, the Democrats get credit but it was Republican Congresses that forced them to do it.” Probably so. Clinton and Gingrich. Obama and sequestration. But the point isn’t “were Clinton and Obama magical deficit cutters?” The question is, are deficits more likely to go down under a Republican president? Or a Democrat? The answer to that question is very clear. By now we know Republicans won’t even pretend to fight deficits under a Republican president. So if you care about deficits, who do want in the Oval office?

So now we’re seeing the spectacle of Republicans willing to crash the world economy unless the Democrats give them major spending cuts they pretend they care about AND YET HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ABLE TO SPECIFY WHAT THEY WANT. This isn’t a demand for cuts. Sure, these guys want spending cuts in an Archie Bunker kind of way. That’s not what this is about. This is about “John Boehner caving to Obama.” This government shutdown is the Republican party’s domestic second Gulf War.

For a decade after the first Iraq war (Papa Bush’s one, the one with the victory parade), everybody in Washington knew the Republican bitter enders were itching to go finish what Bush Sr. had started. Regime change. They’ll greet us as liberators. The regime change crowd met each other at their conferences, took turns introducing the latest hack disguised as a liberator. Showed the latest research about how unpopular Saddam was. Traded ever more ridiculous rumors about terrorism, WMD, anything. Everyone knew what the Wolfowitz-Perle-Cheney crowd were up to. But then Washington forgot everything they knew about this crowd and started believing them and authorized them to lead us in to the worst foreign policy disaster in US history.

Same story today. The incendiary wing of the Republican party is so obsessed about the last one and the times Boehner and McConnell and Ryan “surrendered.” This time, they’ve told themselves, there’s no way home. They haven’t even listed their demands, you object? They’ll undoubtedly come up with some. But that’s not what this is about.