It is a post-financial-crisis myth that austerity-minded conservative governments always favour fiscal prudence, while redistribution-oriented progressives view large deficits as the world’s biggest free lunch. This simplistic perspective, while perhaps containing a grain of truth, badly misses the true underlying political economy of deficits.
The fact is that whenever one party has firm control of government, it has a powerful incentive to borrow to finance its priorities, knowing that it won’t necessarily be the one to foot the bill. So expect US President Donald Trump’s administration, conservative or not, to make aggressive use of budget deficits to fund its priorities for
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