An unsettling milestone occurred in recent weeks, with the federal government’s debt surpassing $40 trillion. When I cast my first ballot in 1984, the $1.5 trillion of national debt was considered a looming crisis. It had nearly tripled and was considered an even bigger crisis by the time Ross Perot first ran for president eight years later. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, the amount was up to $20 trillion.
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There is consternation about this new milestone among politicians and pundits professing to be fiscally conservative. It concerns me too. But there are two other aspects of this generations-long “crisis” that I find politically significant:
- An imminent financial catastrophe due to deficit spending has been prophesied for decades. Like the climate apocalypse, which has also been imminent for decades, it never happened.
- False-flag conservative “budget hawks” used the budget crisis as a reason to never advance other conservative agenda items, while never actually cutting spending either.
As to point number one above, something that cannot go forever won’t. Deficit spending to the degree our Congress spends money is a huge problem, and having 14 percent of federal spending go just to service interest on the national debt is obviously bad.
But is a financial meltdown or a default on the national debt imminent? In 1996, when the national debt was about $5 trillion, Ross Perot stated that, “We are approaching the brink of a financial disaster.” Thirty years later we’re still approaching that brink. Maybe we’re almost there. Or maybe we have many more decades to go.
But this is why point number two is so important to the rise of MAGA and Donald Trump, and also why we cannot let “the deficit crisis” be used as a reason to suspend the cultural battles that are being won under President Trump. For the 24 years after Ross Perot’s first presidential foray, the stated domestic priorities of Republicans and budget hawks in Washington were “fiscal conservatism” and “limited government.” We never got either.
When George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004, Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Despite holding all the power in Washington, the party of spending restraint and limited government could not even find the will to cut funding to PBS. Of course, they somehow found plenty of money for foreign wars and nation-building, and during the mortgage crisis of 2008, Congress also found money to bail out major corporations and the “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions.
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For those of us who cared about the budget situation, but also cared about other cultural and domestic issues too, it was a huge betrayal. We were constantly told that because the fiscal situation was a priority, there wasn’t enough “political capital” to also address issues such as border security.
Even worse, the “fiscally conservative budget hawks” wouldn’t even cut obvious targets of waste, such as aid to foreign despots or funding for NPR, because those appropriations were just “drops in the ocean.” However, if there was ever “drop in the ocean” spending that was a priority to the conservative base, the budget hawks suddenly found religion, and would oppose it as an unacceptable increase in federal spending. Five billion dollars for a border barrier was a “budget buster,” while at the same time Congress was still appropriating billions of dollars to the PLO, and hundreds of millions of dollars to abortion mills.
It is frequently pointed out that to make significant headway in reversing the growing federal deficit, “entitlements” will need to be cut. Entitlements means Social Security and Medicare, of course. That is likely true, but proposing to cut Nana’s Social Security is a non-starter when the government is still funding drag workshops in Ecuador. The only way that the American public will entertain a serious discussion about cutting Social Security and Medicare is once all the other ridiculous, non-essential spending has been cut first. (RELATED: Your Next Senator Will Finally Face the Social Security Decision Point)
The $40 trillion deficit should be addressed. But MAGA conservatives will never again fall for the budget hawk ruse, nor will we allow our agenda to be sidelined while waiting for Congress to rein in wasteful spending.
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