Deficit hawks are dead, and few in Washington can muster any…

Their demise technically came Tuesday when the Congressional Budget Office calculated the federal deficit at $895 billion for the first 11 months of fiscal 2018 - a stunning gap that was met with a collective shrug on Capitol Hill. But the real death of the deficit hawks came late last year and early this year, as Republicans such as Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin who had railed against deficits in the first years of the Obama administration pushed through a massive tax cut despite CBO projections of a surge in federal borrowing.