No Room For Fiscal Conservatives In White House
August 11, 2003
I've often pointed out that todays "Neo-Conservative" republicans in many ways have morphed into Kennedy
Democrats: proactive overseas military adventurism, religious pandering and most disturbingly, economic gambling.
From a purely conservative economic viewpoint the current deficit situation is remarkable in its irresponsiblity.
Imagine if a friend of yours had an avalanche of unexpected and unavoidable expenses (illness perhaps) that also
caused him to work fewer hours and thus bring in less money. If this friend came to you and told you that his
answer to this dilemma was to give some of his money to his employer you would think he was insane. You would
consider your friend an irresponsible lunatic.
All branches of the US government are very truly employees of the taxpayers. They decided
to rebate taxes to a select few of their bosses at a time when anyone could see that revenue was going down and expenses
would be way up. If you were a shareholder you would call this malfeasance, if you were a true fiscal conservative
you would call if fiscal irresponsibility.
If there was any dissent in the capitol the 450 billion dollars deficit the Bush regime has run up just
this year would not have been pushed through. Having a republican plurality riding hard on a popular presidents
coattails makes this kind of, borderline criminal, fiscal malfeasance possible. A decade of prosperity be damned,
let's go back to trickle down economics.
Why do candidates so far to the right abandon fiscal conservativism the moment they enter the District
of Columbia? They do so because tax cuts buy votes, and if the cuts benefit the rich, they also buy contributions in
the hundreds of millions.
Defending taxes is about as popular as defending abortions which is why politicians and moralists looking
for the easy road take both paths so often. Poll after poll shows that the large majority of americans think
deficits are bad, all americans don't like taxes. So when you hit the road to the White House you
had better toss everything you believed in aside because tax cut trumps deficit reduction everytime.
