But the hairpin-turn logic Republicans employ to erode the government usually isn't so obvious as it was Tuesday, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the old GOP bugbear of government spending.

His solution doesn't involve cutting the defense budget or raising taxes. In remarks to Bloomberg, he made it clear that "we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid." Here's Republicans' excuse to go after the things they always wanted to destroy.

So, to recap: Republicans, who claim to care about how much money the government is spending, effectively spent a bunch of money by giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Now they're demanding that to solve the problem partly created by that giveaway, the government should cut benefit programs aimed at alleviating suffering among the most vulnerable people in society. The GOP economic policy can be properly summed up by a bastardized Game of Thrones quote: The rich get to eat, and everyone else takes the shit.

This is obviously politically toxic, since most Americans actually seem to want Medicare expanded. It's also nonsensical from a common-sense policy perspective. Even if you don't buy the lefty idea that deficits don't matter, if you were really concerned about the federal balance sheet, why would you reject the idea of ever raising taxes? Why is the revenue side of the ledger completely off the table whenever a conservative talks about fiscal responsibility?

The answer, of course, is that the rich want lower taxes and the Republican Party is the party of the rich. Even if the combination of tax cuts and slashed benefits is both unpopular and a bad idea on the merits, Republicans will still support it just as rats instinctively chew through wires even if it kills them and starts fires. And just as negotiating with those rats is pointless, debating Republicans on economic policy seems like a lost cause—the GOP only cares about deficits when it's politically convenient, and it won't be honest about its policy goals.

Even when McConnell admitted that the Republicans were going to go after Social Security and Medicare, it was clear that he was also doing a bit of political positioning. "Entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government," he told Bloomberg. In other words, if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterms, expect them to start hollering at the Democrats about making vicious benefit cuts in the name of responsibility and thrift—cuts too unpopular even for the current crop of GOP politicians dominating DC to openly advocate for.

If Democrats learned anything from the past two years, they won't be listening.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.