Here's a blast from the recent past from Think Progress.

Nearly 10 years ago today, on August 1, 2001, the Associated Press reported that the Treasury Department was tapping $51 billion of credit in order to pay for the budgetary cost of the first round of Bush tax cuts’ rebate checks. The AP reported at the time that Democratic Party opponents of the tax cuts worried that they’d return government budgets to "red ink." [...]

But let's just highlight this:

Guess what? They were right. Public debt:

The deficit:

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration—tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. By 2019, we estimate that these two policies will account for almost half—nearly $10 trillion—of the $20 trillion in debt that will be owed under current policies. (The Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 also will substantially increase deficits and debt, but we are unable to quantify these impacts due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues, which will account for less than $2 trillion (less than 10 percent) of the debt at that time. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.

Republicans don't care about the deficit. They just use it to scare Democratic presidents. They care about tax cuts. Democrats should know this by now, and should never have fallen into the deficit trap, but now that they have, the way out is clear.

