Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Tax cuts quieting GOP call for fiscal discipline

Concerns about budget deficits fading

- By Andrew Taylor

WASHINGTON— Republican­s spooked world markets in their ardor to cut spending when Democrat Barack Obama was in the White House. Now, with Republican President Donald Trump pressing for politicall­y popular tax cuts and billions more for the military, few in the GOP are complainin­g about the nation’s soaring debt.

The Tea Partyers and other conservati­ves who seized control of the House in 2010 have morphed into Ronald Reagan-style supply siders while the GOP’s numerous Pentagon pals run roughshod over the few holdouts. Tax cuts in the works could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt while bipartisan pressure for more money for defense, infrastruc­ture and domestic agencies could mean almost $100 billion in additional spending next year alone.

The bottom line: The $20 trillion national debt promises to spiral ever higher with Republican­s controllin­g both Congress and the White House.

“Republican­s gave up on caring about deficits long ago,” bemoaned Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who was elected in the 2010 Tea Party class.

It’s a far cry from the Newt Gingrich-led GOP revolution that stormed Washington two decades ago with a mandate to balance the budget and cut taxes at the same time. Or even from Republican­s of 2001, who enthusiast­ically cut taxes under President George W. Bush, but only at a moment when the government was flush with money.

Now, deficits are back with a vengeance. Medicare and Social Security are drawing closer to insolvency. Fiscal hawks and watchdogs like the Congressio­nal Budget Office warn that the debt is eventually going to drag the economy down.

But like Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush before him, Mr. Trump isn’t talking about deficits. Neither much are voters.

“Voters, frankly, after these huge deficits, are saying, ‘Well, how much do deficits really matter?’” said former Sen. Rick Santorum, RPa., a two-time presidenti­al candidate. “We’re not Greece yet, right?”

Topping the immediate agenda, however, is a debt-financed drive to overhaul the tax system.

Top Capitol Hill Republican­s such as House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had promised for months that a tax overhaul would not add to the deficit, with rate cuts financed by closing loopholes and other steps.

Instead, Republican­s are talking about tax cuts whose costs to the debt — still under negotiatio­n — would be justified by assumption­s of greater economic growth.

“We want pro-growth tax reform that will get the economy going, that will get people back to work, that will give middle-income taxpayers a tax cut and that will put American businesses in a better competitiv­e playing field so that we keep American businesses in America,” Mr. Ryan said in an AP interview this past week. “That’s more important than anything else.”

He backed off months of promises that the Republican­s’ tax plan won’t add to the nation’s ballooning deficit.

The GOP moves could justify $800 billion or so in tax cuts over 10 years, but the administra­tion is pressing behind the scenes to push the envelope well beyond that range.

“They’re starting to talk about tax cuts instead of tax reform,” said former Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H. “When people are desperate to find legislatio­n that they can pass they tend to take the easy path.”

Among the few deficit hawk holdouts is Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a key vote on the Senate Budget Committee, who’s been pumping the brakes on taxes, a stand that’s earned him face-toface meetings with both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Corker says he believes in some adjustment­s but doesn’t want to “let this just be party time that just takes us no place but massive deficits down the road.”

Mr. Trump’s election has GOP military hawks pressing to shovel enormous amounts of money into the Pentagon — about $90 billion over the stringent spending limits set by the hard-won 2011 deficit control effort. Republican demands for spending cuts as the price of lifting the government’s debt limit and averting a market-rattling default on U.S. obligation­s pushed negotiatio­ns perilously close to a market crisis that summer.

The unpopular leftover from the 2011 agreement are those spending limits, which if violated would be enforced by across-the-board spending cuts. Republican­s want to scrap them, at least for military money.

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