Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Don't Care About Deficits? Vote Republican

When Republicans complain about the budget deficit, they're not talking about the shortfall between revenue and spending. It's more complicated.

January 22, 2014 at 8:47 PM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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Jonathan Chait has a smart column up today in which he predicts that Republican reform, should the party wind up winning the presidency and controlling Congress after 2016, will come in the form of Bushism. That is, Republicans will want to enact tax cuts for the rich while also cultivating a "populist" reputation (and erasing the legacy of Mitt Romney's "47%"). How will they square this circle? By exploding the deficit again.

Sounds plausible. I'd add that it's not as incompatible with Republicans' Obama-era deficit fetishism as one might think, for the simple reason that mainstream conservative deficit fetishism has never been about budget balancing in the first place. Instead, what I've called the "war-on-budgeting" school of Republicans has actively resisted grappling with the comparison of revenues and spending. Conservative rhetoric about "deficits" has little relationship to actual budget realities. It makes more sense if it's understood to be an assessment of current levels of taxation compared with ideal tax rates, and current spending (on specific programs, or overall) with the ideal amount of government spending.