Hey, wait a second! Didn’t Republicans around the country gripe their voices hoarse about the size of the federal budget deficit and the debt that President Obama was running up?

Didn’t they proclaim that the world would come crashing down around us all if we didn’t get a handle on the debt?

That was before Donald J. Trump got elected president this past week, apparently.

Now it looks as though we’re about to blow the deficit apart and run up even more debt, now that the GOP is in control of the White House and Capitol Hill.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/deficit-donald-trump-republicans-231372?cmpid=sf

Trump wants to enact a massive infrastructure spending bill — while cutting taxes.

Let me see if I can figure this out. You spend billions of dollars, cut revenue to pay for it and then you watch the debt pile up and, oh yes, run up annual budget deficits that under Obama’s watch had been cut by two-thirds.

As Politico reports: “’There is now a real risk that we will see an onslaught of deficit-financed goodies — tax cuts, infrastructure spending, more on defense — all in the name of stimulus, but which in reality will massively balloon the debt,’ said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”

I guess the GOP is going to return to the refrain that came from former Vice President Dick Cheney, who once declared (in)famously that “deficits don’t matter.”

Well, they do matter, Mr. Vice President. I consider myself a deficit hawk and it troubles me that the upcoming GOP spending spree well might threaten our economic recovery.

If we determine we need to repair our roads, bridges and airports, then we ought to dig a little deeper for the money to pay for them.

And to think the Republican Party once ran on the principle of fiscal responsibility.” What the new president is proposing — and what the GOP-run Congress is likely to approve — is anything but responsible.