I think a lot of us just gave up. It's currently pretty tough to raise your hand and say "cut spending, balance the budget" when people just point to the huge deficits saving the economy.
I'm not going to lie... I struggle a lot trying to understand the economic realities of a global economy. It certainly looks like the bailouts and huge deficits saved us from another recession or depression. Isn't the thought process something like "as long as the economy keeps growing in proportion to the debt then we are in okay shape"?
But it feels to me like we are just pushing things off towards a bigger collapse later. This worries me greatly. We're at 21 trillion in debt right? I can't even wrap my head around how much a trillion is.
I find it somewhat similar to the current climate change discussion. I have a feeling that humans will look back one day, point to a year around this time and say "That's when they could have saved it."
I think there is quite a bit of support for that on the left side of the aisle, although quite a number of us felt "wrong place, wrong time" and highly questioned the logic and motivations of those that pushed that at the time because it was counter to credible economic theory without a clear basis of intellectual support.
Look up "the paradox of thrift"
I'm not happy about a $21T debt and $800B (and growing) deficit.
However were are in a completely different place in 2018 than 2011.
Unemployment is v low, interest rates are rising, and the economy is self sustaining.
Why are we borrowing more money to stimulate an economy (in a very inefficient way though top end tax cuts) while we have the fed looking to pump the brakes?
Not only that, tax cuts are permanent. Yhey are not like an infrastructure project that you can place on hold if the economy takes a downturn and the budget suffers.
Trying to roll back tax cuts during it downturn is counterproductive and contractionary, on the other hand if not done we will absolutely crushed the budget next time we go into recession.
So all that leads me to wonder, why didn't the Tea Party show up when that tax bill was being debated? In fact the freedom caucus was the ones asking to push corporate tax rates even lower than what got approved.
It all looks like bullshit man. If they really cared about the budget and it wasn't about Obama or the left, or just general fear of the economy during the downturn, and what the hell is operating logic people are working under?
I can't make sense of it.