Deficit spending is all in the timing. And the Republicans keep getting it wrong.

You’ve got to hand it to the Republicans; they’ve pulled off quite a feat. Within the last decade, they’ve taken opposite sides on the same issue and managed to be wrong both times. And now it appears they want to go 0 for 3.

The issue I’m talking about is the federal budget deficit. Recently, Republicans in Congress have been dragging their feet on a badly-needed second stimulus bill to counteract the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on our nation’s economy. Concern about excessive spending when we already have a huge budget deficit is commendable, but the Republicans’ timing couldn’t be worse.

We’ve been down this road before. During the 2010 mid-term campaign, Republican candidates for Congress were in a tizzy about Obama’s deficit spending. I remember seeing an attack ad on a Democratic candidate which showed children struggling to get to school while carrying huge backpacks. The backpacks represented the government debt that we were passing on to future generations.

But in 2017, with Republicans in charge of both houses, Congress passed a tax cut without cutting an equal amount of spending. The result was an increase in the deficit, to nearly a trillion dollars last year.

What about the children? Imagine how heavy those backpacks are now!

The backpack ad had a point: we don’t want to pass a lot of debt on to our children. But with deficit spending, as with so many other things, it’s all in the timing.

When the country is in a recession, deficit spending can actually be a good thing. That’s Keynesian economic theory, but it’s also just common sense. In a recession, consumer spending is down, so corporate earnings go down. Companies deal with the problem by laying off workers. But all those former employees now have less money to spend, so consumer spending goes down even further, leading to more reductions in earnings, leading to more layoffs, and the cycle just keeps repeating itself.

Because the federal government depends on the income tax for its revenue, its income goes down when taxpayers’ incomes go down due to the recession. In order to balance the budget, the government would have to lay off workers or reduce social security checks, making the economy much, much worse.

But the government doesn’t have to do that. It can stop the cycle by refusing to lay off workers and helping to pay out benefits to the unemployed, who will then have money to spend, and that will help get the economy back on its feet. That means going into debt, but the alternative is much worse.

So while it is true that Obama and the Democratic Congress got us heavily into debt in 2009–10, it is also true that they got us out of the Great Recession. For that, they should have been thanked rather than scolded.

But when Donald Trump got elected, he inherited an economy that had been growing for several years. That would’ve been the time to think about future generations.

If you’re not going to pay down the federal debt when the economy is growing, when are you going to pay it down?

If the Republican Congress and Republican President elected in 2016 really cared about those backpack-burdened children, they would’ve reduced the deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. But they did the opposite.

Now that opportunity is long gone, as the coronavirus has sent our economy into a recession that makes the Great Recession look like the Really Not So Bad Recession.

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the Democratic House and Republican Senate passed the Cares Act in March, and the economy seemed to be bouncing back in the early summer. But the pandemic’s ravages have not stopped, and the economy doesn’t look so bouncy right now. Many of the Cares Act’s provisions have expired, and the money is running out.

And now Republicans in the Senate have suddenly remembered their opposition to deficit spending.

When the sun is shining, it’s a good idea to save for a rainy day, but when the rain comes, it’s time to spend. And this isn’t just a rainy day. It’s a category 5 hurricane.