So it begins. As congressional Republicans ushered in last year's big tax cuts, saying they would pay for themselves with economic growth, analysts predicted they would instead spike the deficit, giving Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now that the deficit has in fact spiked, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is testing the waters for entitlement cuts.

In a Bloomberg News interview last week, McConnell said it's those decades-old programs for the poor and retirees — and not the new GOP tax cuts — that have caused the deficit to suddenly jump to its highest level in six years. He indicated cutting back those programs is the answer. He didn't announce a GOP push for such cuts, but instead bemoaned how, politically, it can't be done without Democratic buy-in.

On that point, he's probably correct. But Democrats shouldn't bite. Just because Republicans have undermined funding for important safety-net programs with their reckless tax cuts doesn't mean Democrats have any obligation to help them throw those vulnerable populations overboard.

Entitlements do represent a huge portion of the federal budget, and how to keep them solvent is an issue that will always have to be debated. That's what the nation took on when it decided, starting in the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to treat care of the poor and elderly as governmental responsibilities. But underlying these ever-present fiscal debates is the fact that conservatism, as a political philosophy, has never made peace with that decision.

Still, no Republican in politics today who wants to stay there will openly attack Social Security or Medicare on ideological grounds; both programs are too popular. So, couching attempts at cuts strictly as a fiscal necessity is a popular go-to.

So it was that on Tuesday, just a day after the Treasury announced the deficit had jumped to its highest level since 2012 in the wake of GOP tax cuts, McConnell told an interviewer that the "real drivers of the debt" are — you guessed it — entitlement programs.

"It's disappointing, but it's not a Republican problem," McConnell said of a problem that has, almost inarguably, been exacerbated by the tax cuts the GOP forced through last year. He complained of bipartisan resistance to "doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future."

The trial balloon has been officially floated. McConnell is saying more subtly what Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said bluntly last year, before the tax cuts were even passed, that cutting safety-net programs "is how you tackle the debt and the deficit."

Here's another way of tackling the deficit: Don't increase it in the first place with unnecessary tax cuts at a time of full employment. And if you do, don't expect the poor and retirees to pay for it.

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