Appearing with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business News at the Milken Institute, the acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney did his version of "deficits don't matter" to assure us that Trump's economic policies are working. Which is kind of funny, because for eight straight years he was singing an entirely different tune when Barack Obama was in office. Back then, the deficit (inherited from the Bush economic calamity and exacerbated by idiotic tax cuts earlier) was all that mattered to Mulvaney.

Putz.

Joe Scarborough had a good chuckle at Mulvaney's expense this morning, the blatant hypocrisy just too rich not to laugh at.

Source: L.A. Times

Long a deficit hawk, the former congressional representative from South Carolina has presided over a giant increase in the national debt since Trump came to office — first as acting budget chief and now in his current position.

The tax law is expected to reduce federal revenue by $1.5 trillion over a decade, and the budget deficit jumped 17% in the 2018 fiscal year compared with the year before.

Mulvaney admitted that the current level of national debt is something that keeps him “up at night.” He said it gave the U.S. less flexibility in dealing with “exogenous” overseas shocks to the economic system.

“Typically we would be able to fall back on our borrowing ability to sort of get us through that. I don’t know if you could do that when you are $22 trillion in debt,” he said.

But he added that at least for the short term, that has not been a problem.

“I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been complaining about the debt since I ran [for Congress],” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be holding us back from an economic standpoint.”