Republicans liked to present themselves as guardians of the public purse, soberly acting out of fiscal propriety in contrast to Democrats, whom they accused of showering money on people who preferred welfare to jobs. Trump’s tax cuts revealed the hollowness of this pose. Republicans sounded the alarm about deficits when the conversation centered on elements of no interest to the Davos Men who financed their campaigns. Public debt was presented as the reason that the United States could not possibly afford the same sort of national health care that was somehow manageable in nearly every other
...more
