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Look Around the Table. If You Think You Spot Republicans Who Are Deficit Hawks, You Are the Sucker

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1934 Views

Bush-guitar

Speaking of framing that inexplicably takes obviously false Republican claims at face value, there’s this:

Trump’s Tax Plan Is a Reckoning for Republican Deficit Hawks

As President Trump’s top economic advisers faced a barrage of questions on Wednesday about the tax plan they had just unfurled, there was one that they struggled most to answer: how to keep the “massive tax cuts” they proposed from ballooning the federal deficit.

[…]

Republican budget hawks will need to decide whether they want to stick to the arguments of fiscal responsibility that they used to bludgeon Democrats during the Obama era. One of those hawks, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, said Wednesday, “Rather than conforming to arbitrary budget constraints, the president’s plan rightfully aims to jump-start investment, which will produce significantly more revenue for the Treasury over the long term than any revenue-neutral tax plan could generate.”

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who was a fierce critic of deficits when he was a member of Congress, offered a glimpse of the rationale his former colleagues might embrace. “As a conservative, that bothers me a little bit,” he said Tuesday on CNN of the possibility that Mr. Trump’s tax plan would increase the deficit. “But we also look at deficits through sort of a different lens.”

Rappeport does at least make it clear that the Trump tax cuts will lead to yoooge deficits and most “budget hawks” will support them. But it’s bizarre that he sees this as a “struggle” or that he insists on portraying members of Congress who supported Bush’s large, debt-funded tax cuts as “deficit hawks” in the first place. Drum:

When does this nonsense stop? Republicans aren’t deficit hawks. They haven’t been since the Reagan era. Republicans used to be deficit hawks, but the whole point of the Reagan Revolution was that tax cuts were more important than deficits. Their only concern about the deficit these days is as a handy excuse for opposing any increase to social welfare programs.

I know I’m a partisan, but the evidence behind this is about as clear as it could be. Read up on the Reagan tax cut. It took about a decade for the GOP to completely shake off its historical aversion to deficits, but George H. W. Bush’s tax increase in 1990 was the final straw. Since then, deficits have been a rhetorical trope, but nothing more.

Trump’s tax pan is the orthodox Republican position and has been for decades.

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