Watch for a major flipflop on deficit spending.

Trump, at least if he follows through on this one promise, is going to spend a lot of money on infrastructure, which is a great thing. It’s badly needed. And it appears McConnell and Ryan will go along. That, coupled with massive tax cuts and massive increases in defense spending will result in massive additions to the debt.

But the GOP will spin all of that, as they did when Reagan, Bush Sr. and Dubya all spent their way out of recessions and set records for deficits and new debt.

The pattern has been this: GOP gains White House, faces recession, goes to the national credit card with reckless abandon to get out of it. They also include mass hiring in the public sector. Reagan, Bush Sr. and Dubya all hired in excess of a million new public sector employees, respectively.

OTOH, Democrats gain White House, and suddenly the GOP cares mightily about the deficit and the debt. Shuts down, if they can, any new spending, blocks infrastructure aid, blocks stimulus of any kind, screams bloody murder about the debt skyrocketing.

Obama and the Dems acquiesced to this all too easily, and that’s on them. But because they’re so spineless, they would have spent more if the GOP had come even close to operating as they do when they sit in the White House. The Dems, at least from Reagan on, tend to ask the GOP how far they can go, prenegotiate from there, and then offer a “deal” somewhere between the GOP’s first and second choices, never the Dem’s own.

The absence of major spending initiatives after the woefully small initial stimulus is one of the biggest reasons why the economy never really rebounded like it could have. The GOP sabotaged it, to help themselves politically, and the Dems let them. Obama oversaw the first recession with net negative hiring in the public sector. He oversaw the first recession with a much publicized obsession with “cutting spending and deficits.” That, along with decades of accelerated inequality, is why the recovery has been relatively weak, though job growth has been steady and some records have been set for longest strings of jobless claims, etc.