THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And that is what Republicans are doing about Donald Trumps yugely expensive agenda. So far the only parts disclosed are those that give away large chunks of the tax base to those who have no need for more money. And ideas about where the money to pay for the great projects his mouth wrote a check for are non existent.

President-elect Donald Trump intends to launch a broad legislative agenda that includes cutting taxes, rolling back the Affordable Care Act, growing the military and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

The question is how congressional Republicans, after eight years of apocalyptic warnings about the growing national debt, will respond to the dire fiscal implications of proposals that would likely send the deficit soaring.

Taken together, the Trump agenda stands to drain hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the federal balance sheet. His proposed tax cut alone, according to independent analysts, could cost the Treasury as much as $7.2 trillion over a decade.

Some Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, have indicated that some sacred cows might be up for slaughter. Those include federal entitlement programs such as Medicare, long considered a “third rail” of American politics, that Trump himself has shied away from touching.

“You fix the health care problem, you are dramatically fixing the fiscal health of this country,” Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday. “Those are among the things that we have to do if we’re going to truly nurse ourselves back to fiscal health.”

In interviews with more than a dozen congressional Republicans this week — including staunch supporters of Trump and his agenda — most dismissed concerns about potential deficits in a big-spending Trump administration.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who favored austere spending blueprints as House Budget Committee chairman and is now a candidate for a Cabinet post in the Trump administration, said it would be a matter of “priorities.”

“If you prioritize on the things that he and we believe are important … it can actually save money,” Price said.

Most Republicans on Capitol Hill, including former presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), simply dodged questions about Trump’s plans: “We have a debt problem in America that needs to be addressed, but we’re going to wait and see what the proposals are.”

What few things they do say make very clear what every Republican president has displayed, an inability to get anything done while ballooning the debt to the huge proportions they used to scare the public with. And anyone who still wonders why we can't have anything nice anymore will probably never understand what was done to them.