“Yeah, but I won’t be here”
by digby
Here’s an interesting narcissistic rebuttal to Keynes’ famous quip “in the long run we’ll both be dead:”
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt.
Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors—currently about $21 trillion—because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable.
The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office.
“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.
I don’t really care about deficits much either, especially when they grow as a result of an economic downturn. That’s how the economy is managed to avoid as much human misery as possible. But consciously exploding the deficit in good times is actually a Republican trick going way back, even if Trump is taking it to extremes. They do this to hamper progressive programs when they inevitably take over to clean up the GOP’s messes. Their goal is to deconstruct the welfare state whenever possible and one way to do that is to sabotage the economy and then hold vital programs hostage to the deficits they caused. And they can blame the Democerats for doing it! So much winning.
Trump has a completely different motive, of course. He just wants to be Santa Claus for his cult and doesn’t care what happens to the country in any case. It’s all about him. But his needs and desires dovetail nicely with traditional GOP goals in this case so they are fine with it.
.