Republicans Need to Get Their Story Straight on Deficits - Baker, the WSJ
(Gerald Baker is the former Editor in Chief of the WSJ, of course supports conservatives, still interesting).
The intellectual disarray of the modern Republican Party was captured last week by Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Mr. Wicker, along with every one of his 48 Republican colleagues present, voted against the American Rescue Plan, the Democrats’ boldest bid in years to expand the scope of the federal government in the life of Americans. But within hours of this $1.9 trillion leviathan becoming law, Mr. Wicker was celebrating one of its provisions. “Independent restaurant operators have won $28.6 billion worth of targeted relief,” he tweeted triumphantly. “This funding will ensure small businesses can survive the pandemic by helping to adapt their operations and keep their employees on the payroll.”
In fairness to Mr. Wicker, there’s nothing inconsistent about opposing the whole of something while applauding some of its parts. But not even presidents get a line-item veto, and the senator’s slightly curious suggestion of an attempt to claim credit for legislation he’d opposed earned him predictable ridicule from political opponents.
Mr. Wicker’s chutzpah points to the larger Republican and conservative challenge in our new age of fiscal expansionism. Opinion polls show strong public support for the Democrats’ program; it should come as no surprise that the prospect of the federal government giving money away is highly popular. And there is much to disdain in the so-called rescue plan, much of which is the familiar left-wing fiscal profligacy dressed up as crisis response. But as Mr. Wicker acknowledges awkwardly, there is also much in the bill to help low- and middle-income Americans, struggling families with children.
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Republicans are right to be skeptical about the practicality of many of the Democrats’ ideas, but by opposing them they find themselves in an intensely uncomfortable place. Conservatives argue fiercely against Democratic spending plans on the grounds of fiscal restraint, but it rings hollow after decades in which Republican presidents and congresses have added as enthusiastically as Democrats to the federal debt burden. While Republicans can make the case that their deficits are caused in large part by tax cuts that will over time strengthen economic incentives and lift long-term rates of growth, the deliverance remains off in the future.
(snip)
But Republicans won’t succeed if they fall back on familiar opposition to what most Americans, including millions who voted Republican for the first time in 2016 or 2020, believe is necessary: a more active effort to tackle inequality and lift the conditions of the most disadvantaged Americans... Conservatives need to be careful about exactly where they resist.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-need-to-get-their-story-straight-on-deficits-11615831055 (subscription)
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