David M. Drucker: The GOP's fiscal hawk era is officially over

There is no constituency for debt reduction, which is a fancy way of saying voters don’t care that the federal balance sheet is roughly $37 trillion in the red — and growing.

This simple fact of American politics goes a long way toward explaining why President Donald Trump, with the help of congressional Republicans, is pushing a sweeping reconciliation package of tax cuts and fresh domestic spending priorities that is projected to add approximately $3.8 trillion to the swelling federal debt. Politics is a service business and Trump and his Capitol Hill allies are aiming to please the customer.

So they’ve loaded up the reconciliation package, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with a series of crowd-pleasers — expansions of existing tax breaks plus some brand-new ones.

Yes, there are spending cuts. The version of the legislation that passed in the House of Representatives and is now up for consideration in the Senate includes reductions to Medicaid and other budget line items. But there’s nothing in the bill that results in a net decrease in the debt. Even the proposed changes to Medicaid face an uncertain future, thanks to GOP opposition in the Senate.

That’s because the sort of substantial spending cuts and program reforms required to break Washington’s addiction to borrowing would be wildly unpopular. For instance, any meaningful attempt to balance the books probably requires both raising taxes and overhauling Medicare and Social Security. That’s not a recipe for winning elections.

As concerning as the U.S. debt load is becoming for bond markets and some finance titans (and the few fiscal hawks left in Washington), most Americans have more urgent concerns, said David Winston, a Republican pollster who has been surveying voters for more than 25 years.

“There’s another issue hitting voters that’s a bigger deal, and that’s inflation,” he told me. “When you’re looking at an economic situation where there’s something that’s pressing people at a personal level, it’s not that the deficit isn’t important, it is. But being able to pay bills and deal with things on a weekly basis and keep up with all your costs takes precedence.”

Winston is right — and that’s not to mention the fact that so many voters are convinced the looming debt bomb can be diffused by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in government spending.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Voters generally, particularly on the left, have always found some reason or another for opposing legislation that asks them to participate in the solution to Washington’s fiscal challenges. It’s why tax hikes on the so-called rich are so popular and such an easy political message to wield.

What has changed is the Republican Party and the voters it represents.

Without question, Republican presidents prior to Trump were complicit in running up the debt. But in the pre-Trump era defined by President Ronald Reagan, fiscal responsibility and small government had currency with grassroots conservatives who formed the heart of the GOP base. But today’s Republican base voters are different than their forebearers, courtesy of a Trump populist makeover.

The 45th and 47th president over the past decade attracted legions of working-class voters to the Republican Party. For the most part, these newer Republicans are former Democrats who joined the GOP for cultural reasons; for instance, they passionately oppose abortion rights and support gun rights. Notably, they brought with them their preference for government safety-net programs and general lack of concern about the debt (qualities that have long defined grassroots Democrats).

Simultaneously, suburban voters inclined to value fiscal responsibility generally, and debt reduction specifically, have drifted away from the GOP.

The result is a Republican governing coalition much more enamored of government spending than it used to be and far less concerned about the federal debt, even though it has grown to more than 120% of the entire U.S. economy — problematic to say the least.

Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist in Washington and coauthor of The Great Revolt; Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, has closely monitored this electoral transformation.

“The voters who are additive to the coalition as a result of Donald Trump are voters who are not only comfortable with entitlements. They’re wary of anybody that might cut them. One of the reasons these voters were not Republican for a long time is because they believed the Democrats’ scare tactics on entitlements,” Todd told me. “The realignment works both ways. Some of the voters Republicans have lost are upscale suburbanites who are fiscal conservatives.”

“Republicans tried to do privatized Social Security accounts; A to Z budgeting; baseline budgeting; line-item veto; balanced budget amendment,” he added. “We’ve tried all those innovations, none of them resulted in winning elections. Culture does result in winning elections and so Donald Trump just came along and made the party about culture and not conservative economics.”

As a political writer, I’ve never met a voter who was for fiscal profligacy. Everyone tells pollsters it’s important for the government to live within its means. After all, that’s what they have to do.

But when it comes to being a part of the solution, well — I’m reminded of a weekday afternoon in the early 2000s, when I interviewed voters outside a Southern California grocery store. I was a cub reporter for a small, suburban daily newspaper covering the state budget, which back then was chronically imbalanced. State law limited California’s capacity to borrow, necessitating tax hikes, spending cuts, or some mixture of the two, and I decided to ask people which approach they preferred.

The most consistent response? I pay so much in taxes already, those guys up in Sacramento ought to cut my taxes and increase spending on government programs to benefit people like me.

I’m willing to bet that’s what most Americans think about Washington’s fiscal imbalance right now.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP."

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