When asked recently about the possibility of rolling back President Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) – who voted against the tax cuts before he voted for them – responded by arguing that the tax cuts have increased the federal government’s revenue (H/T: Talking Points Memo). Writing for Time, Justin Fox disputes this assertion and demonstrates that the Bush tax cuts have not, in fact, increased federal revenue.
This is not exactly a surprise, but it seems to me that we’re missing the forest for the trees. What journalists and bloggers should be asking is this: What happened to fiscal conservatism, and why has it been replaced with a borrow and spend variant of fiscal liberalism?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of tax cuts. I think that it’s good for the economy for Americans’ taxes to be as low as they possibly can be, and because I’m a federalist I believe that they could be quite low because the federal government shouldn’t be doing most of what our taxes are funding. But the problem with the Bush tax cuts is that they lack corresponding spending cuts. In other words, Bush has replaced tax and spend liberalism with borrow and spend liberalism. His tax cuts are far from conservative.
John McCain, who once argued that the Bush tax cuts were irresponsible, could be the honest conservative in this election cycle to point out that tax cuts without spending cuts have nothing to do with fiscal conservatism. He could be the candidate to start a dialogue in this country about authentic fiscal conservatism, beginning with spending cuts and ending with tax reform. He could be the candidate to promise no more irresponsible tax cuts until spending is under control. Instead, he has decided to jump on the Bush bandwagon and embrace assertions that are demonstrably false.
The Republicans won in 1994 because they promised fiscal conservatism – not just lower taxes, but decreased spending. They may have delivered on the former, but they’ve yet to deliver on the latter. By failing to deliver spending cuts, they have abandoned the conservative soul of the Republican Party and have instead embraced a borrow and spend liberalism that is even more dangerous to our government and economy than tax and spend liberalism. When are the Republicans going to wake up and realize that the American people aren’t going to trust them with leadership so long as they’re still saying one thing and doing quite another?
Filed under: Blogs, John McCain, News, Politics, Republicans
I take it that you are a democrat? You try and find things wrong with Senator John McCain because he is the most qualified and experienced candidate. I think that there is a middle ground here somewhere between the tax and spend liberalism and theborrow and spend liberalism and you should try finding that rather than the moral high ground.
While tax cuts do not automatically mean revenue increases, there are circumstances in which tax cuts DO increase revenue. Public revenue boomed during the Reagan years, growing at an annual inflation-adjusted rate of 2.2% a year.
However, I would agree with you that there’s gotta be spending cuts, and these gotta come first. Ultimately any spending cut turns into a tax cut. Either the budget is balanced and inflation slows, the debt is paid down and interest rates go down, or the surplus can be turned into actual tax cuts.