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.”
I have made no such claims and I ignore those over the top arguments and commentators. McCain has made one true statement in his campaign, and that is that he doesn't know much about the economy. This is obvious looking at McCain/Kennedy which would have been an economic disaster and at McCain/Lieberman which would be even more so.
But I don't think for one minute that this mean, nasty, arrogant, duplicitous old man can get elected. He will certainly get no help from me.
You forget how much the illegals are going to cost us, not only in brand spanking new taxes, but culturally as well.
Marxist McCAin has Fiscal Discipline? LOL LOL LOL. This article is a joke.
MaCain is a Marxist who did more damage to freedom of speech with his McCain-Feingold than anyone. This empowered the government to censor even the internet.
For a decade .McCain also has been trying to import 100 million Marxist voters from Mexico and the 3rd world. McCain has worked tirelessly for over a decade to give Amnesty to 30 million illegals and their families back in the 3rd world. This and his other actions not his lies proves McCain is a Marxist.
Hmmm. My memory isn’t the best, but as I recall President RR came into office with a 600-700 billion debt and left with a 2-3 trillion debt. We also switched from a creditor to a debtor nation on his watch.
McCain should be able to beat that record.
and who appointed him, McCain, no, it was GHW Bush.
Good advise. Whoever wins the election in November, we need to be prepared for the worst.
Trashing Reagan accomplishes nothing.
Strangely, you left out the fact that NTU rated Ron Paul even more “tightfisted.”
The harder these idiots try to make McCain looks conservative, the angrier and more resistant I become towards McCain.
When they compare him to Reagan, it shows desperation and the willingness to attempt to manipulate and use conservatives.
Warning to GOPbots: Argue about the WOT and make us forget about all of the sticking in the back that McCain has done to conservatives and indeed the GOP.
Putting on a Reagan mask is his version of “reaching out” to (in his opinion) idiot conservatives.
Government educated people don’t understand how the government works and how we are still a nation of laws.
The only way to reduce government spending and size is to REPEAL all these laws that MANDATE these thousands of government programs and agencies. A President cannot repeal these laws. The liberal media has bashed Reagan and Bush relentlessly using this tactic. People believe that a president makes up the whole budget. No. Most of the budget is mandatory spending like entitlements which the president has no control over. Only congress can repeal these laws and the president can only sign these laws. Bush has kept the small part of the budget that is discretionary domestic spending below the rate of inflation every year. But liberals and the media bash Bush and Reagan when presidents cannot repeal laws. Bush tried to privatize social security and the media, Rinos like Mccain, and the Democrats stopped him.
The government schools have again failed like government has always failed. No one is talking about repealing all these laws that create this huge government and that cripple capitalism.That is what is needed, repeal all the environmental laws, repeal FDR’s socialist New Deal, repeal LBJ’s great society etc.
Yep, a president who listened to Warren Rudman too much.
Yes, he "could".
And Monkeys "could" also fly out my butt.
And if indeed Winged Primates depart from nether regions sometime before election day "then and only then" will I vote for Johnny.
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that McCain is going to get the republican nomination. His principles are way out of touch with true conservative ideals. His stance on immigration alone borders on being criminal.
I liken those that blindly support the republican party to the frog that will not get out of the slowly simmering pan of water. In the end the frog dies and the republican backers lose any semblance of what their party was meant to stand for.
I switched to being an independent when the republican party left me a few years ago. I was actually going to vote for Romney if he won the republican nomination. There is no way that myself or a number of people I know are going to vote for McCain.
McCain reaches out to conservatives with his idiotic claim that we would be better off with him rather than Hillary or Barak. What that means is that on the top six issues Hillary is wrong on all six while McCain is “only” wrong on five.
It will hurt as much as it did when Ronald Reagan came back to whip Jimma Cahta’s butt - that is - not at all.
FLushing a RINO is as good as flushing a Dem.
America can survive a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama for four years. It CAN’T survive TWO liberal political parties.
“This rush to support the asshole just makes me sick!!
That’s what so many people don’t understand: When you sell your vote cheap you’re owned.
Staying home isn’t a good idea though, leave the pres. line blank and vote right on the other lines.
Can you try to be fiscally prudent if you also insist on adding 20 million poor illegal aliens to Medicaid and Social Security?
Answer: only if you are too stupid to understand what you are doing.
I don’t doubt John McCain’s sincerity on illegal alien amnesty, global warming, Guantanamo, etc.
I do think he is stupid.
ANWR oil-drilling is overrated. We’d still have to buy from despots. Switchgrass and/or algae biofuel, nuclear energy, clean coal(with algae biomass feeding off and containing the pollutants, whose excess growth can be used for biofuels), canadian tar-sands oil, etc. are the real answer. ANWR is a short-term solution. Will only delay things for at most a few years. A distraction. Let’s deal with the issue forever. And corn biofuels suck.
Bill to improve health care…in Mexico!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1967331/posts
...the senator who introduced the bill, Senator John McCain of Arizona...
With any luck McCain will pick a conservative running mate, make spending an issue in his first budgets, take some steps to secure the border in anticipation of amenesty, stabilize the government in Iraq, and then face a Republican Congress or Senate after his midterm elections that will limit the damage he can do. Hey, I’m an optimist.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.