As I wrote for Politico today, I’m all for Republicans focusing on spending, but it needs a constant, long-term effort if they’re going to move the needle:
It’s very strange not to seriously pursue a deeply held goal when you have unified control of Washington, then to insist on trying to achieve much of it in one fell swoop when you barely have control of one chamber of Congress.
But here we are. This is the Republican pattern. It has been, fundamentally, driven by the fact that two Republican presidents in row now have won the White House by effectively running against the fiscal conservatism of the congressional wing of the party.
George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was an implicit rebuke of Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing majorities that tried to balance the budget at all costs. Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again populism was a rejection of Paul Ryan’s debt-obsessed majority that hoped to move the goal posts on entitlement reform.
The problem is that Ryan was right about the substance and Trump is right about the politics, and that dilemma — in a nutshell — is why the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is nearly 100 percent and is projected to keep climbing.