Lest We Forget Mitch Daniels Never Once Cared About Deficits or Paying Bills

WaPo has a completely laughable profile of Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and his perceived attention to fiscal responsibility.

Daniels presided as George W. Bush's budget director for the first half of Bush's first term.  This begs the attention of anyone who was alive at that time as to how someone can take the largest surplus ever and turn it into chronic deficits and still be treated by the media as a fiscal hawk.

To be certain, let's look at Daniels' fiscal reality.  The Bush tax cuts, which Daniels trumpeted as the greatest budget solvent in American history, robbed the federal government of at least $5 trillion in revenue in Bush's 8 years.

Now Republicans see less government revenue not as a bad thing but as a form of smaller taxes and less money for the government to spend on minorities and poor people.  So a loss of $5 trillion over 8 years is no big deal to them.

But those 8 years were full of endless war where Bush invaded two countries without raising a single penny to pay for them.  Plus it was an era of huge government expansion.  Republicans legislated the largest expansion of Medicare ever, again without a single penny to pay for it-- adding nearly a trillion more dollars to the deficit in 10 years.  By the time Bush left office, he had increased spending by 60%, ran up a $1.4 trillion deficit, doubled the national debt and grew government larger than any president since FDR.

All of this came at the blessing of Mitch Daniels, who never complained one single time about debts when Bush was in power and who has been wrong about every single federal fiscal policy he has ever spoken of.  Needless to say, while chest thumping how great war with Iraq would be, Daniels opined the whole Glorious endeavor would only cost about $60 billion with a few billion more for an occupation.  Wow was he wrong.  So wrong that that alone should be enough to laugh him off the stage.  The opposite is happening, however.  He's viewed stringently as a very serious debt slashing Republican who must be allowed to still give advice on fiscal matters, just so long as we don't bring up his track record on fiscal matters.

*Update:

A reader emails me that Daniels' past could also be chalked up as something else in the GOP's history that never happened.  Indeed it could.