In fairness, all those things are the expected outcomes of hugely profligate spending and have been seen in other economies that adopted the same policies. It's surely a bit of an open question why the USA, and to some extent other western countries, have been able to sustain such huge deficits for so long apparently in defiance of financial gravity. I think you're implying the WSJ's interest in the topic was entirely political in nature, but it's also possible they just noticed that their predictions kept not coming true and dropped it for that reason. After all, Trump promised big spending with tax decreases, with correspondingly huge deficits, and there doesn't seem to have been any negative effect of that (yet).