Everybody on the planet knew this was coming. Every Democrat, every Republican, every reporter, every wonk, every wonk's dull-eyed goldfish floating in a green-tinged bowl. Everybody. In the wake of the Republican tax cuts on the rich, the federal budget deficit has exploded.
The deficit grew 77 percent in the first four months of fiscal 2019 compared with the same period one year before, Treasury said.
The total deficit for the four-month period was $310 billion, Treasury said, up from $176 billion for the same period one year earlier.
After decades of conservative rants about austerity, and pay-as-you-go, and Democratic spendthrifts and blah-blah-Fox-News-blah, the first thing the Republican Party did with a House-Senate-Presidency trifecta was to absolutely crater the federal budget with a tax giveaway centered on the rich. Of course. As always.
You can blame a very, very large chunk of this on former House Speaker Paul Ryan, wonkish crafter of this buffoonish anti-plan, and it remains peculiar in the extreme that he scurried out of office immediately afterward rather than sticking around for the absolutely certain follow-up Republican demand that the new Republican deficits be paid for withholding food aid to the poor, medical aid to the sick and new tax hikes on anyone who does not have their own pocket lobbying firm.
We're still going to bet he, as one of the few Republicans fully briefed on where the Russian hacking investigation was headed, decided he needed to be a thousand miles from Washington before that particular shoe dropped, but we could be wrong. He may be planning an imminent return as lobbyist devoted to opening new work camps for poor children. We don't have the money to feed them or send them to school, he'll explain as he points to a chart of the deficits he himself created. And these Nikes aren't going to stitch themselves.