Posted on 02/09/2008 8:35:27 AM PST by rob777
Before my more conservative friends start leaping from buildings over Senator John McCain’s presidential primary victories, let me try to coax them back in from the ledge. Despite his myriad apostasies (e.g. McCain-Feingold’s free-speech limits, anti-ANWR-oil-drilling votes, a mixed tax-cut record, creeping Kyotoism, and cold feet on waterboarding), the Arizona Republican could do for fiscal responsibility what Ronald Reagan did for tax relief.
Thanks to the Gipper, tax reduction is as central to the Republican faith as the Resurrection is to Christianity. True, McCain heretically opposed President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. However, he now appears penitent and observant. He proposes to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent and slice corporate taxes from 35 to 25 percent, among other reforms.
But in terms of limited-government, today’s GOP recalls the Roman Catholic Church’s excesses before the Reformation of 1517. For nearly a decade, Republicans have indulged in a spending bacchanal that shredded their moral authority and shocked Republican true believers. Like a latter-day Martin Luther, a President McCain may nail his own “95 Theses” to the U.S. Capitol’s front door and shame Congress, before it spends again.
Cato Institute researcher Michael Tanner cites White House figures to illustrate how Washington’s spending has waned and waxed since 1980. Under President Reagan, overall federal outlays decreased from 22.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product, to 21.2. On President G.H.W. Bush’s watch, spending increased to 21.4 percent. During the Clinton years, expenditures fell to 18.5. And during President G.W. Bush’s tenure, spending boomeranged to 20.7 percent of GDP.
“Reagan had a Democratic House to contend with, so anything he achieved was to the good,” Tanner explains. “The elder president Bush was sort of a non-event. Clinton and a Republican Congress represented the most fiscally conservative period. And this President Bush and a Republican Congress were a disaster.”
McCain largely has refused to be led into temptation. He supported 2001’s $143.4 billion No Child Left Behind Act, but fought 2002’s $180 billion farm bailout, 2003’s $558 billion Medicare drug entitlement, and 2005’s $286.4 billion highway bill, which contained 6,371 earmarks worth $24 billion.
“Those were the four biggest budget-busting bills of the Bush presidency,” notes Heritage Foundation fiscal analyst Brian Riedl. “And McCain voted against three of them.”
Wouldn’t it be refreshing for a President McCain, at last, to give America’s farmers the straight talk they so richly deserve?
“My friends,” McCain might declare before some Mid-Western barn, “when it rains, you cry for flood relief, and it cascades in. When the skies are cloudless, you scream for drought assistance, and it arrives. When your prices are low, you demand help, and the checks soon follow. Since last January, corn prices have climbed 123 percent. Soy beans are up 176 percent, and spring wheat has risen 274 percent. And yet Washington stands ready to grant your howls for $286 billion in yet another farm-welfare bonanza. Enough already. Please stop farming the government and go till your fields. The party is over. The trough is empty. Goodbye.”
Hayekian fantasy? Hardly.
McCain courageously opposed the wasteful, environmentally destructive federal ethanol program -- while battling his Republican rivals in Iowa.
“I will open every market in the world to Iowa’s agricultural products. I’m the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see,” McCain said at the December 12 Des Moines Register debate. “And I will also eliminate subsidies on ethanol and other agricultural products. They are an impediment to competition. They’re an impediment to free markets. And I believe that subsidies are a mistake.”
McCain has stayed tightfisted on the hustings. According to a January 29 National Taxpayers Union study of presidential candidates’ promises, McCain wants $6.9 billion in new spending. Former Massachusetts governor Willard Mitt Romney favors $19.5 billion in fresh outlays. “Free-market” Romney’s automated phone calls in Florida actually slammed McCain because he “voted against the AARP-backed Medicare prescription-drug program.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee advocates $54.2 billion in government-funded initiatives. Romney’s ideological gymnastics and Huckabee’s folksy profligacy should worry taxpayers.
“You would not have to look hard for reasons to dislike McCain,” says Cato’s Michael Tanner. “But if spending is what you care about, he is far more conservative than either Romney or Huckabee.”
“Some things in life are quite simple. Here’s one of them: Sen. John McCain is going to be our next president.”...Larry Kudlow
Yeah and he though we were in Bull Market 15,000 too. But last I looked we’re around 12,200
If only he would champion the same restraint on regulations - particularly environmental ones. It appears from his stance on global warming and gas taxes that he will have no compunction against passing on huge and costly regulatory rules and fees to businesses and individuals. This simply shifts the cost burden onto the private sector in order to accomplish the same socialistic goals.
Actually he and his open border buddy lobbyists have gotten, without ever passing a law one magnificent tax increase... I am not MOVEMENT anything, and I do not buy fables of deception.
I have no intention of leaping from a building. I intend to let the GOP do that when I and a lot more like me become unaffiliated the day after McCain's nomination.
NO more pulling the R lever for this conservative. That kind of thinking's what got us in this box with this particular nominee in the first place.
It's as if the Party is telling conservatives to **** off! Dunno why, but they do seem to be doing that. SO this conservative is gonna **** off!
It's simply that the GOP is dying. W's "compassionate consevatism" guaranteed it. The GOP selecting John McCain to be its nomination is just the most telling symptom of the final stage of its demise. It's time for real conservatives to move on and find a new political home.
I reject the notion of 100% orthodoxy. That would terrify me. I like McCain’s independence, even when he skews in a direction I don’t like. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me 100%, and I don’t trust the ones who tell me they do.
I get accused of being a party hack for supporting McCain, but what is the Conservative principle at play in handing out no bid, no oversight contracts to Halliburton, Parsons etc, that derailed our war efforts, helped wreck our economy, and delivered a raft of talking points to Dems? If that reconstruction money had been well spent, maybe this war would have gone better. The Dems would certainly have fewer talking points.
I never understood this part of Movement Conservatism, where no bid contracts and corporate welfare are favored over competitive markets. I guess that’s why I’m a conservative and not a Conservative.
I understand that McCain is not, and never will be, one of you. But while you’re pointing out McCain’s flaws, I wish you’d also demand that the genuine Movement Conservatives stop enabling bad behavior that hurts the country and Conservatism.
But none of this changes the fact that neither Conservative Republicans nor Movement Conservatives have the votes to do anything without an alliance. Some of you guys are positing this scenario where Movement COnservatives reject Conservative Republicans in 2008 so you can recapture everything in 2012.
That assumes Republican Conservatives will be ok with that, after the price the moderate wing paid to support Movement Conservative policies.
Let’s not forget that under reagan, taxes went down, and deficit spending went up. Reagan was not a 100% success in regard to the buget. He was great for the economy, not so hot for the buget...although we could argue that it wasn’t 100% his fault deficit spending went up.
So if someone claims to be the “reagan of fiscal disipline”, TELL ME WHY I SHOULD BE SO IMPRESSED? The buget is the least impressive item of the reagan legacy.
In case you haven’t noticed, Movement Conservatives have been trading increased spending to the Dems for tax cuts, just like what happened under Reagan.
I’m not going to try to talk you into supporting McCain, I just wish you’d call BS on guys like Bush too. Tax cuts + insane spending = greater betrayal of Conservatism than anything McCain ever did. The no bid contracts and lack of oversight in Iraq betrayed the war effort more than anything the Dems have done.
In case you haven’t noticed, Dems have now lost their fear of promising to raise taxes, that’s how badly conservative stewardship of the economy has gotten. And McCain’s not the one who put us in this place, it’s President Bush with the 100% support of Movement Conservatives.
Basically with some of the folks here, it’s not Conservatism that’s the issue, you guys all seem fine with any number of betrayals of Conservatism from folks not named McCain.
Given McCain’s unabashed liberal leaning while attempting to appear a conservative is what I will not buy.
Yeah, this is the part I’m not getting either, folks are all, McCain will damage Conservatism, they don’t seem to be aware that “Conservatism” is badly tarnished after Movement Conservatives enabled 2 Neoliberal terms under Bush.
What’s most needed now is someone to convince middle America that Conservatism isn’t a wingnut philosophy that’s harmful to America, because that’s the impression of 2/3 of the country right now.
Instead of bashing McCain, Movement Conservatives should be focused on making America understand, Bush by and large wasn’t a Conservative and that was the problem.
I can’t stand McCain. He is revolting, you have it right.
Kudlaw also predicted the amnesty bill would pass-no matter what.
We need primaries where everyone votes at the same time. It’s not fair to allow New York, and California to vote. The rest of us have been effectively shut out of the nomination process. I am in Wisconsin; we have no say.
McCain did not wander, he rejected everything. Tax cuts, bad on environment, illegal immigration, campaign finance etc. He sided with the Democrats in all the important votes - including judges. No way, I will support McCain.
The problem with any analysis of McCain’s fiscal record is that it fails to take into account his acceptance of open borders. We don’t have to theorize what happens when a region fills up with Third World migrants. California is our canary in the coal mine, and the result of Juan Hernandez McCain’s open borders policy there has been anything but fiscally conservative. Maybe he hasn’t listed a bunch of new programs he wants to implement, but what difference does that make when he wants to invite tens of millions of people demanding such programs into our neighborhoods and our voting booths?
Not without a another huge fight. mccain or not if there's one thing that unites Americans it's opposition to anymore amnesties.
McCain does have a good record on spending. My concern is that that does not translate to an overall respect for limited Constitutional government, personal responsibility and individual liberty.
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