How Republicans Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Crushing Federal Debt

Two decades after a GOP vice president declared that deficits don’t matter, Trump and his party are going all out to test that theory.

WASHINGTON – Two decades after then-Vice President Dick Cheney declared that deficits don’t matter, members of his own party appear intent on proving his theory, adding another massive, multi-trillion-dollar slab onto the national debt.

Despite frequently expressing outrage about how much the country is borrowing to pay for basic operating costs, President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress voted to erode the tax base even further, increasing annual deficits and sending the federal debt to historic highs.

Trump inherited a robust economy with low unemployment in 2017 and yet, with a big tax cut, began generating $1 trillion-a-year budget deficits. When the COVID pandemic hit in the final year of his term, shrinking tax revenues while simultaneously requiring massive federal spending to avert a recession, the combination left Trump adding $8 trillion to the debt in just four years.

As he began his second term in January, the anticipated new debt already projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office totaled some $7 trillion, and that was before the $3.4 trillion his new legislation will add over the coming decade. If the temporary components of the just-passed tax bill — such as new deductions for the elderly and those earning overtime and tip income — are made permanent, that total would surpass $5 trillion.

Bobby Kogan, an economist with liberal Center for American Progress, said if there were ever a time to let expiring tax cuts lapse, as the 2017 Trump tax cuts would have this year, to put the country’s finances closer to a stable path, it was now, with low unemployment and a relatively strong economy.