WASHINGTON IS PLUNGING INTO A NEW ROUND OF FINANCIALLY RECKLESS IDIOCY THAT WILL BRING THE COUNTRY CLOSER TO INSOLVENCY—AND BOTH PARTIES ARE COMPLICIT.

There, do I have your attention?

I feel like I have to shout because it’s crystal clear that nobody—the White House, Congress, and most of the public—cares about the mushrooming federal deficit and the debt.

And yet President Trump and the Hill just agreed to a deal that will increase federal spending and the flood of red ink.

The Republicans are being hypocritical because they decried the growing deficits under Barack Obama, but don’t care that they’ve continued to mushroom under Trump.

Former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough tweeted: “There are no small government conservatives left in Washington. None. If Newt Gingrich agreed to this deal, we would have run him out of DC on the same day. We balanced the budget four years in a row. These Big Government Republicans are bankrupting us.”

Democrats are being hypocritical because they didn’t make a fuss over the Obama deficits. But at least under this latest deal, they’re getting the increased federal spending they want, on domestic programs. And you don’t hear the party’s presidential candidates talking much about the deficit.

Politically, no one cares. It’s not a big voting issue any more, and hasn’t been since the 1992 campaign (which eventually led to four years of balanced budgets under Clinton-Republican compromises). Those of us who rail against it sound like Whigs.

The deal that’s just been struck blows up the spending caps that Congress had imposed on itself--perhaps the last vestige of financial restraint—allowing that Obama-era law to expire in 2021. And it would raise spending by $320 billion over the next two years.

As part of the package, both sides agree to lift the debt ceiling for the remainder of Trump’s term.

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Now the debt ceiling is a club that the opposition party uses to pummel the incumbent party and extract concessions. It has created a series of showdowns and fiscal cliffs, because if the Hill doesn’t raise the debt limit, the United States would default on bills it’s already committed to pay. I’d have no problem getting rid of the ritual, since it’s more about posturing than fiscal restraint. But in this case it gave the Dems leverage.

The numbers: the federal debt has now grown to a staggering $22 trillion. And the federal deficit has reached $747 billion, a 23 percent increase over last year, with a couple of months to go in this fiscal year.

The Trump tax cuts exacerbated the problem. Rather than paying for themselves, they cut federal revenue by 8 percent.

In fairness, Trump didn’t run as a small-government conservative. He promised in interviews—and I once pressed him on this—to protect Medicare and Social Security. The problem is that those two entitlement programs, left unchecked, eventually could bankrupt the government.

The administration recently let it be known that Trump wants major budget cuts in his second term, if there is one, but who knows whether that will happen?

While the deal was front-page news in yesterday’s Washington Post and New York Times, the story will quickly fade. The media will be far more interested in covering Mueller, Trump vs. the Squad, Jeffrey Epstein and a whole lot of other subjects than the green-eyeshade stuff.

To their credit, a handful of conservatives in politics and media are criticizing the deal, the details of which still have to be hammered out by the Hill.

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Rep. Chip Roy tweeted that “the GOP is now, in the name of ‘defense spending,’ mortgaging our future national & economic security.”

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham called it “unacceptable” and “just a nightmare.”

But with Donald, Mitch, Chuck and Nancy on board, there’s little question it will happen—and digging out of this financial mess will be even harder next time.