Republicans have gotten sidetracked and Democrats would rather talk about anything else.
Ted Cruz is annoyed with Congress. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since, as with any decent legislator, Ted Cruz is almost always annoyed with Congress. “My single greatest frustration in Washington,” he told Time, “is in the [past] seven months, the U.S. Senate has spent virtually zero time even talking about jobs and the economy. We spent a month battling about taking away people’s Second Amendment gun rights.”
He’s right that Congress, and the Senate in particular, have neglected the economy in favor of less urgent issues like immigration and gun control. But there’s another, more specific issue – closely intertwined with both the economy and jobs – that’s been virtually absent from the conversation in Washington: the national debt.
It’s a curious oversight. The debt hasn’t exactly disappeared; the official total stands at about $16.9 trillion, and more thorough tallies put it upwards of $70 trillion. The American people are still worried about our fiscal imbalance; a Pew poll from the beginning of this year found that reducing the deficit ranked third on a list of public priorities, up 19 percent since the beginning of Obama’s first term, the biggest rise for any issue. And the news cycle has brought plenty of reminders of the deleterious effects of debt, most recently when Detroit collapsed under the weight of an estimated $18 to $20 billion in liabilities.
For much of 2010 and 2011, the debt was given plenty of prominence thanks to the ascendance of the Tea Party and a series of budget skirmishes that illuminated Washington’s infuriating inability to cut spending. Then came the 2012 election season. Mitt Romney was never an effective advocate for debt reduction, or deficit reduction, or spending cuts (or any issue, or cause, or thing, for that matter). The Democrats, hell-bent on discussing anything other than the budget, threw a series of temper tantrums over piddling issues, inventing the “war on women” and recasting Romney’s mostly spotless career at Bain Capital as an earth-shaking plutocratic stampede over the poor. The attacks were entirely predictable, and when Romney didn’t effectively respond, so was Obama’s victory.
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