No one cares about The National Debt unless they are discussing a program they don't like and thus want to cut under the pretense of Balancing the Budget. OK, maybe there are a few true deficit hawks holed up in Beltway think tanks, people who genuinely fret that the chickens will some day come home to rustle up their interest payments. But for the most part, The Deficit is a Super Smash Bros fan that people use to speed-smack things they've decided cannot be done. This is something to keep in mind throughout the escalating Democratic primary, wherein ideas that match the scale of the problems we face on healthcare and the climate crisis are often fanned by candidates from the centrist wing. It's also something to keep in mind while monitoring the activities of the current administration.

When Donald Trump first came to office, he hired plenty of traditional Republican types who use deficit doom as an argument for slashing the social-safety net. They showed him a graph of projected debt growth and his response, reportedly, was, "Yeah, but I won’t be here." Sounds like his general attitude towards climate, and anything else. Anyway, this has been reflected in his approach to governance, wherein he championed a tax cut for corporations and the rich that will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost us $1.9 trillion over 10 years. Republicans said it would supercharge corporate investment, which it did not, as many firms instead funneled their paydays into stock buybacks to boost their share prices without creating actual new value. Needless to say, the cut did not—as per conservative mythology—pay for itself. The deficit, or the government's operating loss, has ballooned to $1 trillion a year.



But you know what's coming. The guiding principle for Trumpists is that there is not a single shred of observable reality on which we can all agree, and that the truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. So Monica Crowley, who made the time-honored leap from Fox News contributor to Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury, went back to her old stomping grounds—or at least the neighboring precincts of Fox Business—to say this.

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Treasury Secretary Assistant Sec. Monica Crowley defends cuts to entitlements in Trump's new 2021 budget proposal: "The president also understands that Washington's habit of out of control spending without consequence has to be stopped." pic.twitter.com/4VdP3fItJ6 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 10, 2020

This monotonically Orwellian riff is a case study in shamelessness as a political weapon. If you just say it on television, it can become true, even if it sounds like you're reading the table of contents in an IKEA manual. It's also a reminder that in many, many ways, Trump is doing what any Republican president would do. He's set to go after safety-net programs in a big way now, looting the commonwealth for the benefit of people who often already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime. President Rubio would have relished doing the same. But while, again, very few people actually care about The Deficit, here's a reminder, via Steve Bennen at MSNBC, of when The Deficit goes up and when it goes down.

MSNBC

You'll notice the only time in recent history that there was a budget surplus was under President Bill Clinton. Then George W. Bush squandered the surplus with a tax cut and two disastrous foreign wars on the national credit card. He left office amid the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, but Barack Obama found a way to cut the deficit in half while bailing out Wall Street—but not many homeowners—and injecting a (too-small) stimulus into the economy. Then Trump blew it up with the tax cut and also with some Democrats' help, as they acquiesced to his insane military spending with minimal pushback. Nancy Pelosi would tell you they got parental leave into the last defense spending bill, which is great, but it was $738 billion we apparently don't have for healthcare or education or rebuilding our infrastructure to cope with the coming age of climate calamity.



That's the thing about government spending: we have $1 trillion to spend on the F-35, a fighter jet that has had problems flying, but we have to cut funding that helps people eat right before Christmas. It's almost like the people who want food don't pay the campaign bills, and don't have lobbyists representing their interests. Never mind that most SNAP program recipients are children, the elderly, and the disabled, and that most of those who can work do—but are stuck in unstable jobs with low wages. That means that American taxpayers are in a way subsidizing private firms that refuse to pay their workers a living wage, but forget all that. We must cut the food money to address the deficit we expanded with tax cuts that went to stock buybacks! And they keep telling us it's Bernie Sanders who's insane.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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