It’s finally time to stop believing Republicans when they say they’re the party of balanced budgets.
For eight years, Republicans warned the American public that we were hurtling toward certain fiscal doom. President Barack Obama’s oversight of the deficit was leaving “America’s future in the balance,” the Republican National Committee said in 2011. A year later, Senator Mitch McConnell said the federal debt was “the nation’s most serious long-term problem.” The debt was “killing our economy,” according to John Boehner in 2013, when he was the House speaker.
President Trump, ostensibly the party’s standard-bearer, made it clear Thursday that he’s not very concerned about the national debt. In a series of tweets, he blamed Mr. McConnell and Speaker Paul D. Ryan for their handling of legislation to raise the debt ceiling, something Republicans argued for years had to be paired with spending cuts. “Could have been so easy — now a mess!” the president said.
