The official end of the Tea Party

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The story begins a decade ago, when a budget deficit that had declined to a modest $161 billion by 2007 was hit with the Great Recession.

Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats.

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President Trump and congressional leaders are nearing a deal that would raise the discretionary-spending caps by $320 billion over two years and offset less than one-quarter of those costs (and even those offsets would take a decade to materialize). The budget deal would essentially repeal the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act and raise the baseline for future discretionary spending by nearly $2 trillion over the decade.

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By 2017, a Pew poll showed that just 15 percent of Republicans supported paring back the escalating costs of Medicare or Social Security to bring down the deficit

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