Dwain Northey (Gen X)

And Suddenly, It Was All the Democrats’ Fault

I’m really looking forward to November.

Or January.

Whenever the political calendar finally gets around to changing the wallpaper in Washington, I suspect we’re going to witness one of the greatest disappearing acts in modern American politics.

Because if Democrats take control of the House and Senate, suddenly — magically — Republicans are going to rediscover the national debt.

Remember the deficit?

That thing we were apparently not supposed to worry about yesterday?

Oh, they’re going to worry about it.

A lot.

Suddenly every Republican talking head on television will become deeply concerned about fiscal responsibility. We’ll hear about reckless spending. We’ll hear about how Democrats inherited an economy that was supposedly humming along beautifully and immediately drove it into a ditch.

There will be charts.

There will be ominous music.

There will be someone on Fox News pointing at a red line going upward while explaining that Democrats have “destroyed the economy.”

And somewhere, somebody will say:

“We had a plan.”

Of course they did.

It was apparently a fantastic plan.

Everything was working.

The economy was perfect.

The deficit was under control.

The national debt was apparently just taking a little nap.

The oil reserves were going to be overflowing.

Manufacturing was coming back.

Inflation was defeated.

The tariffs were brilliant.

The tax cuts were going to pay for themselves.

And apparently America was about twelve minutes away from achieving financial independence from mathematics itself.

Then Democrats got elected.

And ruined everything.

Because that is the beautiful simplicity of partisan accounting.

When your party is in charge, everything good is evidence of your policies.

When your party is out of power, everything bad is evidence of theirs.

It’s like political quantum physics.

The economy can simultaneously be fantastic when your guy is president and absolutely catastrophic when the other guy becomes president — without changing anything except the party affiliation of the person standing behind the podium.

And the national debt?

Well, that one is particularly entertaining.

CBO’s February 2026 projections already had the federal government running a $1.9 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, with debt held by the public projected to reach 120% of GDP by 2036.

And CBO’s more recent numbers estimated the deficit had already reached $1.8 trillion through the first ten months of fiscal 2026.

So when the political winds change, don’t be surprised when the people who spent years telling us not to worry suddenly discover that deficits are, in fact, a problem.

It’s not that the numbers changed.

The political ownership of the numbers changed.

And then comes 2028.

Oh, 2028 is going to be spectacular.

If the economy is struggling, we’ll hear that Democrats broke it.

Not the tariffs.

Not the cumulative fiscal decisions.

Not the interest payments.

Not the policies that helped create the deficit.

Not the fact that America’s fiscal problems have been building for decades under presidents and Congresses from both parties.

Nope.

It’ll be:

“Look what the Democrats did.”

Because apparently the American economy has the institutional memory of a goldfish.

The Republican administration can spend years making decisions, Republicans can spend years controlling Congress, Republicans can spend years defending those decisions — and then, once Democrats take over, the economic scoreboard apparently resets to zero.

Suddenly everything before the inauguration is ancient history.

It’s the political equivalent of spilling milk on the kitchen floor and blaming the guy who moved into the house three months later.

And here’s the really depressing part:

It works.

Not because everybody is stupid.

Because people are busy.

People have jobs.

Bills.

Kids.

Mortgages.

Car payments.

Medical expenses.

They don’t have time to spend their evenings reading Congressional Budget Office reports and tracing fiscal policy through ten-year budget windows.

So somebody on television gives them a simple explanation:

“Democrats caused this.”

And for millions of people, that’s enough.

Never mind that CBO’s own analysis shows federal deficits are the product of multiple interacting factors — spending, revenues, interest costs, economic conditions and policy changes — rather than some magical switch that gets flipped when one party walks through the White House door.

And tariffs aren’t some imaginary footnote either. CBO’s August 2026 update said changes in trade policy through July were projected to make deficits $0.9 trillion larger over 2027–2036 compared with its February baseline.

But nuance doesn’t fit particularly well on cable news.

“The deficit is complicated and reflects decades of bipartisan fiscal decisions” doesn’t make a very good chyron.

“DEMOCRATS DESTROY ECONOMY” fits beautifully across the bottom of the screen.

And that’s the part that frustrates me most.

We’re old enough to remember when political arguments were at least occasionally about what somebody actually planned to do.

Now we’ve turned government into a perpetual blame relay.

Nobody wants to carry the baton.

Everybody just wants to explain why they didn’t drop it.

The deficit is somebody else’s fault.

Inflation is somebody else’s fault.

The economy is somebody else’s fault.

The debt is somebody else’s fault.

And when the next election comes around, we’re apparently expected to forget everything that happened before the last election.

Maybe someday we’ll stop treating the federal budget like a football game where the objective isn’t to win, but to make sure the other team gets blamed for the score.

Until then, enjoy the show.

Because sometime after the next election, the same people who told us everything was going great will discover that everything is terrible.

And the reason will be remarkably convenient:

The Democrats did it.

Again.

Because apparently Washington has discovered the ultimate economic principle:

If you’re in charge, you get the credit.

If you’re out of charge, you get the blame.

And if you’re really good at politics, you get both.