One thing is already back to normal

 The front page of the Business section of my local paper ran two sharply different articles Sunday.  On the right margin, the header was “Trump leaves an expensive legacy of debt.” The tone of the article is, quite properly, pretty disapproving of the $7.8 trillion increase in the Federal government’s debt over the course of the dumpster fire.  

For the first 3 years of smoldering stink, the deficit generally grew along the trendline it followed in the previous administration under Barak Obama.  In 2020, the debt surged as Federal dollars attempted to fill in the hole created to "flatten the curve" of the pandemic.  This timing and objective of this was glazed over in favor of a discussion of the problems swollen debt will cause in the future.  What wasn’t glazed over was a 2018 corporate tax relief provision that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost $1.9 trillion over 11 years.  Keep those numbers in mind.

On the left margin of the page, the Business section ran an article headed, “First step to jolt economy: Huge aid bill”.  The article gushed about the President-elect will be arriving in Washington “with an ambitious economic agenda.”  The agenda, it goes on, will kick off with an emergency coronavirus relief bill priced at—wait for it--$1.9 trillion.  The article gushes on about the agenda pushing along with all the usual suspects: infrastructure boondoggles, clean-energy jobs, health care, and other staples of the leftish wish list. (To be fairish, corporate tax relief is a usual suspect on the right side.)

So, it’s back to business as usual.  The Democrats propose a right-now increase in the national deficit of $1.9 trillion and the newspaper celebrates it.  A 3-year-old tax break offering up the same total over a span of 11 years draws scorn and derision right on the same page.  Ladies and gentlemen, watch your wallets.