Occasionally I pick up the Wall Street Journal when traveling. The reference to "tax and spend" Democrats raised my ire, so I wrote the following, which apparently went into the circular file at the WSJ...
To the Editor/Wall Street Journal:
Congressional Budget Office projections at the end of the Clinton administration showed the federal debt disappearing by the end of the decade, a result of $5.6 trillion in federal surpluses. Over the past 25 years, 16 of which were presided over by Republican administrations, the only administration to produce a federal surplus was Democratic. Today, under four years of Bush "fiscal conservatism", the CBO is projecting the debt to reach in excess of $1 trillion by 2014 -- thought by many to be understated by several trillion dollars because it assumes no change to the Alternative Minimum Tax (which may impact up to 30 million Americans), and the unlikely sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the decade (itself a cynical accounting move to deflate the true cost of those tax cuts).
The implication is clear -- the "tax and spend" policies of the Democrats, if that's what you want to call them, are far more fiscally responsible than the "don't tax and do spend" policies of the current and past Republican administrations -- starting with Ronald Reagan who himself was responsible for the then-largest deficits in history. At least President Reagan had the integrity to recognize his miscalculation, and began to roll back some of his tax cuts towards the end of his administration -- more than can be said for the current administration.
Here's the WSJ op-ed I was responding to...
August 31, 2004
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
A Reform GOP?
Republicans gathered in New York this week will be advertising their accomplishments, and fair enough. Yet if President Bush and the rest of his Grand Old Party want to turn their wispy hold on power into a real governing majority, they'll reassert their ebbing claim as the party of ideas.
Measured in offices held, the GOP hasn't been this strong since the 1920s. Republicans hold the White House and both branches of Congress, albeit narrowly but also by dint of an historic mid-term election victory in 2002. The party also owns 28 of the 50 governorships, including in the large, dynamic states of Texas, Florida and California. With an incumbent President seeking re-election, the GOP has a chance to forge a real mandate to govern.
Yet there is also a sense that the GOP, especially its Congressional wing, has been drifting from the principles that brought it to power. In 2000, Candidate Bush described the GOP as the party of reform -- from Social Security to Medicare, greater accountability in education and the "compassionate conservatism" of faith-based charity. Four years later, Americans are left wondering if Republicans still believe in that agenda, or if they're slowly being captured by the inertia of Beltway incumbency.
Granted, this is not the case on national security, where Mr. Bush has united the party behind the assertive use of American power. In a sense, all Republicans are "neoconservatives" now, or at least they are as long as Mr. Bush prevails in November. The party's realist, Brent Scowcroft wing is waiting to reassert itself if he loses -- represented by the likes of Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel -- but for now those differences are muted.
Under Mr. Bush, the GOP has also become the natural home for cultural traditionalists. Partly this is because the Democrats have so heartily embraced Hollywood and secularism, but it has also been driven by Mr. Bush's heartland instincts. This works to the GOP's political advantage on such issues as guns, where a majority opposes state controls. But it may cost the party on such matters as stem cell research, where science clashes with the party's dominant anti-abortion wing. At least the GOP is debating such vital matters: Democrats long ago banished any anti-abortion dissent.
Perhaps the biggest question is whether the GOP can still rightly call itself the party of smaller government. The GOP Congress -- as well as some of its state parties (Ohio, New York) -- has seemed only too comfortable acting as the party of the incumbent status quo, dolloping out pork to any interest group that might help it remain in power. The result has been the largest farm bill in history, as well as the largest new entitlement (for prescription drugs) since the 1960s. Huge energy and highway spending bills failed not from principled opposition but from internal squabbling.
If Republicans want to see the perils of this strategy, they might look at the blue (Democratic) patches of the electoral map that are Illinois, New Jersey and Long Island. Once GOP strongholds, those areas all turned left after Republican machines grew corrupt and became little different than tax-and-spend Democrats. It's no accident that the dynamic and growing parts of the GOP are in the South and West, in places like Florida, where Governor Jeb Bush has promoted school reform, or Colorado, where Governor Bill Owens has returned tax surpluses to voters instead of growing the government.
Internal GOP resistance to some of President Bush's pro-growth, reform agenda shows that too much of the party still opposes change. A rump group in the Senate have prevented him from making his tax cuts permanent, though without those tax cuts Republicans would be heading for defe a91 at this fall amid a much poorer economy.
Republicans in the House keep telling Mr. Bush to forget about personal Social Security accounts, despite their appeal to younger voters. And a nativist party faction has stood in way of his far-sighted immigration reform that is essential if the GOP is ever going to attract enough Hispanic voters to sustain a majority amid sweeping demographic change.
If voters want to elect the party of the government status quo, they can and probably should turn to the Democrats. Republicans have to stake their claim to govern on individual empowerment and the reform of our unsustainable, New Deal public-sector monopolies. In this information age of global competition and rapid technological change, Americans want a party that will give them more control over their finances and pensions, their health care, and especially their time. We'll be looking for evidence this week that the Republicans want to be that party.
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