“Nobody Cares”

Mick Mulvaney was the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He's also Trump's chief of staff.

Before he held those titles, Mulvaney was a founding member of the House Republican Freedom Caucus which, as you probably know, was a caucus of deficit hawks that grew out of the Tea Party wave election of 2010 that installed most of its members in their seats.

Members of the Freedom Caucus still occasionally pretend to care about the federal deficit, but not co-founder Mick Mulvaney. In 2019, Mulvaney says "nobody cares."

The State of the Union, accordingly, did not mention the deficit situation, in either a positive or negative light. Indeed, chief of staff and budget chief Mick Mulvaney, who pretended very, very hard to care about the deficit as a Congress member during the Obama years, told Republicans privately that “nobody cares” anymore.

I'm not going to say Mulvaney is wrong, but rather than say 'nobody cares anymore,' I think it would be more appropriate to say 'nobody cares right now.'

Nobody cares right now, but they will as soon as Trump leaves the White House.

Given what's coming in the near future -- between climate change, a possible recession, baby boomer retirements, Trump's tax cuts, and crumbling infrastructure -- the next Democratic presidential administration will likely be hounded on the deficit even louder than President Obama was. The calls for austerity will be louder than they've ever been.

But not today. Today, a Republican is in office and "nobody cares." And Trump isn't even running up the deficit for any particularly good of worthwhile reason. Republicans threw away nearly a decade of reasonable fiscal discipline with tax cuts for the rich.