Washington (AFP)

Republican opponents attached to the sacrosanct budgetary balance kept denouncing the spending of the Obama administration. Since the election of Donald Trump, they have remained silent, despite an increasing debt and a budgetary balance that has just been pushed back.

"My party is very interested in deficits when a Democratic president is in the White House. The worst thing in the world was the deficit when Barack Obama was president," said Donald Trump chief of staff and former budget director recently. at the White House, Mick Mulvaney, according to the Washington Post.

Republican "tax hawks" constantly attacked the Democratic president on his budget, whether it was spending to revive the economy after the 2008 financial crisis, or reforming the health care system.

During the Republican convention for the presidential election in 2012, a giant clock had been displayed which included the thousands of billions of American debt under the Obama administration.

But since Donald Trump's arrival at the White House in January 2017, they have remained silent. Even when the president announces that he is pushing the balance to 2035, instead of 2030, no longer bothering with budgetary austerity, which has been the mantra of his party for decades.

"Tax hawks are clearly an endangered species," Bill Hoagland, a former Senate budget expert, told AFP.

"The fiscal hawks that have been heard the most under the Obama administration have remained largely silent" since the election of Donald Trump, commented Romina Boccia of the Conservative Studies Center Heritage foundation.

This change of attitude betrays a "political opportunism" of the Republicans, who used the debt and the deficit to attack Barack Obama, estimates Ben Ritz, of the think tank Progressive Policy Institute, which leans to the left.

"We see that these people who criticized Obama for much lower flow levels suddenly agree with much higher levels under the Trump presidency," he said.

- "the king of debt" -

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who vehemently opposed Barack Obama, attacked the Democratic President over his tax policies which could have led to the "red wave of debt".

And Donald Trump who, during his 2016 presidential campaign, called himself "the king of debt", recently, in an in camera meeting, asked "But who cares, about the budget?" , according to the Washington Post.

However, if there is no one left to stop this escalation, reaching such debt and deficit levels could make the United States incapable of fighting a future recession, while the country, which has been growing for 11 years, is experiencing its longest period of economic expansion.

"Interest (on debt) could become the most important program of the federal government," worries Marc Goldwein, of the study center Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, who stresses that "your debt cannot grow faster than the economy ad vitam aeternam ".

The president of the American Central Bank (Fed), recently called to take advantage of the good figures of the American economy to reduce the budgetary deficit, underlining in particular that "a more durable federal budget can support the economy in the long run".

Creeping debt and deficit make it harder for the government to speed up spending to support a slowing economy.

The budget deficit is expected to reach $ 1.015 billion at the end of the fiscal year in September, and the debt is expected to represent 81% of GDP this year, according to Congressional Budget Services.

© 2020 AFP