Republicans Learn to Love Debt

By BRYCE COVERT AUG. 25, 2017

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.

He’s right. It is a mess. But it’s not a mess Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan created this summer. It’s a mess Republicans laid the groundwork for over eight years of impeding a presidency and an economy because of their professed desire for fiscal restraint.

In early 2016, the R.N.C. was still warning about “an unsustainable path toward crippling debt” after President Obama released his final budget. Mr. Trump got in on the game during the campaign, blaming Mr. Obama for leaving the country buried under a “mountain of debt.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/republicans-debt-ceiling-budget.html?emc=edit_th_20170825&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284