Bad News and Good News

There’s a news item from last week that readers might have missed. I refer not to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s projection that the federal deficit will surpass $1 trillion this year for the first time since the depths of the recession in 2010, with the national debt having now surpassed $22 trillion.

As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes, “as time went on… Republicans decided to stop pretending to care about the debt. They voted several times to blow past spending limits, and now have done so to the tune of another $340 billion… they have given up all pretense. The Freedom Caucus, founded to supposedly represent the Tea Party values of limited government in Congress, has devolved into a PR shop for Trump.”

Klein notes that what’s “remarkable is that this is happening during a strong economy and with interest rates still at historically high levels…” (But maybe not. With the economic expansion now ten years old, the Commerce Department just reported that national GDP increased by just 2.1 percent in the second quarter, the lowest single-quarter rate since Trump took office in January 2017. Business investment is at -0.6 percent for the quarter, the lowest since the first quarter of 2016.)

But why would I even want to talk about any of this economic news, when that great icon of conservative ideology, Rush Limbaugh, who spent decades attacking big-government liberals with their massive spending and disregard for ballooning debt and deficits, just recently told his listeners that “nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around….”