Trump’s party isn’t going to cut spending.

Excerpted from The Dispatch, by Nick Catoggio, Published July 19, 2024 - It is technically possible, I guess, to reduce the national debt while also reducing federal revenue if you’re willing to slash spending aggressively enough. But it’s so wildly unrealistic, especially for the GOP in its current incarnation, that it stands out as a brazen lie even by Trump’s standards.

It’s not the sort of lie you tell when you’re trying to put one over on voters. It’s the sort of lie you tell when you don’t care a whit about an issue and can’t be roused to pretend otherwise.

Trump’s party isn’t going to cut spending. If there was any doubt about that, his record during his first term—before the pandemic, not just after—removed it. For him, fiscal policy is determined by what’s good for his near-term polling, not what’s good for America’s long-term health. “No tax on tips” is a nice example: That’s stupid for many reasons, starting with its effect on the deficit, but it might help him win Nevada. The same goes for his interest in replacing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell with a flunky who’ll cut interest rates on his say-so. Reducing rates would goose inflation, but the immediate stimulus to the economy would give Trump some “numbers” he can boast about.

The growing burden of servicing the national debt is one of the two biggest challenges facing America, yet the Republican nominee has never so much as glanced in the direction of meaningfully addressing it. In 2016 he ludicrously vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years while simultaneously swearing up and down that he wouldn’t touch entitlements, a promise that persists to this day. The only thing one can say in his defense is that, incredibly, the other party is even less serious about fiscal stability than Republicans are. (link)

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