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Post-Bush Boom
Investor's Business Daily
Election '08: The Republican Party released Wednesday the economic policies that its candidates will run on this fall. The plan gives voters a choice between prosperity and Ameri-sclerosis. The GOP plan — which focuses on four areas: energy, taxes, pork and long-term growth — is welcome, as the party had been wandering in the wilderness for a while.
Or, as former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said in Monday's Washington Times, "the left is cleaning" conservatives' clock, because the party has lacked the energy to get behind the sensible thinking that resonates with voters. But if the Republican economic proposal is any indication, it seems as if it has remembered it is the only party that provides a realistic hope of smaller government and greater economic growth.
While the Democrats, even with their fixation on "change," can't break away from their leftist orthodoxy, the Republicans are offering voters a distinctly "progressive" alternative, progressive in that if it is followed, it will advance, rather than set back, the economy.
With gasoline prices having gone past $4 a gallon and giving no indication they'll turn back soon, the Democratic Congress, which thinks that seizing oil companies' profits will cut prices at the pump, clearly has no answers to rising energy prices.
But the GOP, should it regain its congressional majority, promises that it will: allow drilling of untapped domestic oil reserves; let the private sector develop the country's enormous oil shale resources; end the menu of local and regional gasoline formulations, which have cut supplies by disrupting our fuel distribution system; sever the web of federal regulations so that some badly needed fuel refineries can be built; and push nuclear energy.
The Republicans promise, as well, to stop the tax hike — it would be the largest in our history — that's coming unless the Bush cuts are renewed. If the Democrats can let the cuts sunset in 2010, 48 million couples will be hit with an average annual increase of $3,007. And another 116 million taxpayers will owe, on average, an additional $1,800 on their taxes each year.
Other tax-related plans — additional tax breaks and the choice of a two-tiered flat tax that's filed on a single page — are welcome parts of a (largely) inspired package of GOP ideas.
For the long term, the Republicans are talking up free trade, tax cuts for entrepreneurs, reforming Social Security and Medicare, rules to tie spending increases to economic growth and tort reform.
More immediately, the GOP says it will crack down on pork. When they were given control of Congress in the 2006 elections, Democrats promised to kick the pork habit. Yet federal waste has actually grown under Democratic leadership.
The Republicans say they'll do what the Democrats couldn't. We admit that breaking lawmakers' bipartisan addiction to pork isn't easy. But Republicans have one advantage the Democrats don't have: At its core, no matter how some in the party have strayed, the GOP philosophically stands for smaller government.
Roll Call reports that "Democrats continued to dismiss the GOP agenda as unimaginative." But what could lack imagination more than the Democrats' blind and unyielding devotion to socialist economic themes? What could ruin an economy quicker and more thoroughly than the reckless, depleted and failed policies of Big Government run by small men?
The Republican plan isn't perfect. Too many bones — more spending on education, renewable energy, tax incentives for conservation — are thrown to centrists and undecideds. And there's not enough emphasis on additional tax cuts.
Still, it's far better than any plan the other party could offer.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 16 June 2008