Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

The news that this fiscal year’s budget deficit is projected to jump 84 percent from last year and near $1 trillion was overshadowed, as so much news these days is, by developments in the Mueller investigation. But the shift on the national balance sheet may reshape the political battlefield, with Democrats eager to seize the mantle of fiscal responsibility and Republicans increasingly comfortable surfing their own wave of red ink.

During the Obama presidency, Republicans were fiscal Paul Reveres, warning of a “tipping point” of debt that would turn America into Greece. But as former vice president Dick Cheney once said, Ronald Reagan proved that in politics, “deficits don’t matter”—and Republican voters showed it again in 2016 by nominating Donald Trump, a candidate who christened himself the “King of Debt,” pledged to double what Hillary Clinton would spend on infrastructure and chastised opponents who wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. After some initial grumbling about expensive Trump ideas like his famous wall, Republican officeholders have largely saluted their new free-spending leader.


As president, Trump went through the motions of being a budget balancer. He picked Mick Mulvaney, a hardcore fiscal conservative, as his budget director, then proposed a fiscal year 2018 budget with draconian cuts to non-military spending. But nobody takes Trump’s budget seriously, not even himself. Congressional leaders are working on a two-year budget deal that could increase spending by as much as $300 billion. Combined with this year’s tax cuts, that would likely push the annual budget deficit over $1 trillion. (Last year, it was $519 billion.)

Democrats, meanwhile, are reconnecting with their inner bean counter. They may join hands with Republicans on new spending. But they have been attacking Trump’s tax reform as a budget-buster.

Still sensing a populist pulse in the electorate, Democrats consistently hit the corporate tax cuts from the left. But keeping an eye on right-leaning swing voters, they are pairing concern about widening inequality with concern about widening deficits.

During the legislative debate over tax reform, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi warned, “we are going to borrow [our] children and grandchildren’s future in order to go deeply into debt to fund more tax breaks at the high end.” Missouri moderate Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year, speaks of the “debt-inducing, make-rich-people-richer tax bill.”

The worries about the deficit extend all the way to the keeper of the socialist flame, Bernie Sanders. In his response to Trump’s State of the Union address, the Vermont senator lamented that the new tax law, “provides 83 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent [and] drives up the deficit by $1.7 trillion.” Sanders’ closest ally in the Senate, Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, this week posted on Twitter, “I’m so old, I remember when… the Republican party pretended to care about deficits.” Several issues still divide the populist and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, but calling out Republicans for increasing the budget deficit isn’t one of them.

But does that make the Democratic attempt to outflank Republicans on their fiscal right smart politics?

At the time of Cheney’s famous nostrum about deficits, in 2002, he was lecturing a skeptical Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that the expensive war in Afghanistan was no reason to scuttle a push for new tax cuts. An unmoved O’Neill was fired. President George W. Bush got his tax cuts. A bitter O’Neill fed Cheney’s quote to author Ron Suskind (the Michael Wolff of Bush’s first term). The deficit exploded. And Cheney was proven right—nobody cared.

The Democratic nominee in 2004, Sen. John Kerry, said in the fall debates that the president “added more debt … in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.” In his first 2012 general election debate, Mitt Romney said “the president has put in place … almost as much debt held by the public as all prior presidents combined.” Both statements, in addition to lacking historical context, failed to rile the public and derail the incumbent’s re-election.

In both those elections, GDP growth was better in the fourth year of the president’s term than the first. Cheney’s maxim should really be, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter … when the economy is headed in the right direction.” When Bush’s father sought to succeed Reagan in 1988, and GDP growth was especially strong, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen scoffed, “If you let me write $200 billion of hot checks every year, I could give you an illusion of prosperity, too.” Yet voters thought the illusion looked pretty good, and gave Bush Sr. the nod.

However, Bush Sr. would eventually pay the political price for Reagan’s deficits. Inflation had begun to rise by the tail end of the Reagan presidency, prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and curtail the money supply. The growing budget deficit prompted Bush Sr. in 1990 to abandon his “No New Taxes” campaign pledge and accept a fiscally sound but politically disastrous bipartisan deal to raise taxes.

The Fed, which by this point had already begun to ease rates, subsequently accelerated the pace. But the previous rate increases had already contributed to a recession that undermined the Bush presidency. And since the budget had been running red ink for so long, there was nothing in reserve for a Keynesian blast of stimulus. Besides, the tax increase went in the opposite macroeconomic direction.

The deficit became a political punching bag, despite the fact that Bush Sr. had actually done something to ameliorate it. The 1992 Democratic nominee and eventual victor Bill Clinton incongruously slammed the incumbent for both “rais[ing] taxes on the people driving pickup trucks” and for “promis[ing] to balance the budget [when] he hasn’t even tried.” Ross Perot mounted one of the most successful third-party bids in history, almost solely based on a quixotic fixation with the deficit. The issue struck a bigger nerve than four years prior because it served as a handy scapegoat for a weak economy, even though its role in the recession was indirect.

So where does that leave Democrats today? The economy appears to be in pretty good shape– growth is mild but steady, jobs are being created, wages are ticking up. If voters are content with the trajectory, hysterics over the deficit will be ignored.

But the recent stock market spasm was a red flag. Traders are worried that wage growth, combined with the Trump’s tax cut, will spark inflation and cause interest rates to rise at a faster clip than expected. If all that does turn the economy south, there will be a case to make that the tax reform law was a poorly timed busting of the budget.

However, even if it makes sense to stoke deficit concerns in the short-run, long-term downsides for Democrats would remain. Once Democrats regain power, they won’t want to be placed in fiscal restraints. They will want the latitude to pursue infrastructure investment, expanded preschool, college affordability, drug abuse treatment and anti-poverty measures. The Sanders wing wants to go even farther, with plans for single-payer health care and free college tuition. Signaling to voters that the deficit is their own primary concern only sets Democrats up for failure.

Better to hammer the Trump’s tax reform on the grounds of economic unfairness, or – since it’s possible voters will be happy with their tax bill by Election Day – let the tax issue lie and focus on all the other ways Trump is destroying the fabric of society.

Meanwhile, keeping in mind the Democrats’ interest in future spending, they should still paint Republicans in a fiscal corner and lay bare their hypocrisy. Democrats will always have a hard time selling proposals with big price tags. Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t win the presidency in 1932 on a pledge of Keynesian stimulus; he argued that “government—federal and state and local—costs too much” and that “government of all kinds, big and little, [should] be made solvent.” When President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, he assured, “it can be done without any increase in spending. In fact … it can be done with an actual reduction in federal expenditures.”

The last thing Democrats need is a Republican Party dogging them about those price tags, and making the hypocrisy case today will help Democrats kick Republicans to the curb tomorrow. They should remind voters how Republicans flooded Washington with red ink under Reagan, Bush Jr. and Trump. They should expose how Republicans always say they will crack down on spending, but when once in power, never follow through. This is not just about Trump’s Republican Party, but a lack of credibility on budgets that goes back decades.

But if, while making that case, Democrats contend that Trump’s growing budget deficit really does presents a grave threat to the next generation, they will have lost the battle for their own policy agenda before it has begun.