If the emerging Capitol Hill budget deal is “the worst in history,” as one watchdog group calls it, a large part of the fault lies with President Trump’s inept “government shutdown” over funding for a border wall last winter.
By fighting and losing that budget battle, Trump gave up almost all leverage for any spending restraint any time soon.
The impending deal reportedly calls for lifting existing discretionary spending “caps” by $320 billion during the next two years. The deal could add as much as $2 trillion in even greater debt (above the exorbitant debt already projected) in a ten-year span.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, called the reported deal “a total abdication of fiscal responsibility by Congress and the President. It may end up being the worst budget agreement in our nation’s history.” The liberal Washington Post headline all but chortled that the “emerging budget deal [is] likely to include few or no actual spending cuts.” The conservative editorialists at the Wall Street Journal called it a “bad budget deal” that amounts to “another spending blowout.”
The seeds for this new fiscal disaster were sown in Trump’s mishandling of the border wall fight. Trump entered last winter’s budget battle by openly welcoming a shutdown. Actually, he had been calling for shutdowns off and on since at least May 2017. This “I’m tougher than you/double-dog-dare-you” stance ensured that he, not the Democrats, would take all the blame for any important disruptions a shutdown might cause.
Worse, it put Republicans in the position of arguing that government shutdowns should occur in order to demand more spending. This completely undercut their decadeslong position that the reason for drawing budget lines in the sand is to fight against overspending, deficits, and debt.
Then, when Trump emerged from the battle as an absolute loser, having secured even less border wall funding than the Democrats had originally offered to finance, it gave Democrats the assurance that he can’t back up his bluster. Apparently it taught Trump the same lesson, because this time he isn’t even putting up a real fight. Without presidential backing, the already weak-kneed Senate Republican majority starts from a horribly weak negotiating position. Hence, the awful deal that adds to the chance for a real debt crisis.
As MacGuineas wrote a few weeks ago, “Never has the deficit been this large when the economy was so strong.” And never, with the exception of the temporary debt incurred due to World War II, has the debt as a proportion of gross domestic product ever been so high.
Trump has lived his whole adult life borrowing bigly and then stepping away from unpaid bills. He, or his companies, could do that in the private sector because of bankruptcy laws that allowed him to game the system. In the long run, though, a national government can’t get away with those tricks. Its only way out, eventually, will be to drastically inflate the currency, leaving an economic mess for hundreds of millions of Americans who will suffer from higher prices.
Trump really won’t reap the bad seeds he has sown. He’ll probably be gone from office by then. It’s just the rest of us who will suffer from his indiscipline, ineptitude, and weakness.
