John Howard and his spending spree
Joe Cambria
If it were not for the war on terror I would be wishing for a John Howard defeat because of his spending spree. And I am betting a lot of conservatives are thinking along similar lines.
This last week John Howard went on a spending binge. It seems Howard suffers from a malady called "keeping up with the ALP". He recently witnessed his Parliamentary neighbour from across the aisle splurging and promising new programs like he had just won the lotto.
The malady must have hit John Howard very badly this weekend because the papers are telling us he has promised us lucky devils A$6 billion dollars in new programs and increases in total government spending.
But as usually happens to conservatives, once they start behaving like the free-spending left who think the entire GDP is money a pot that needs to be redistributed, they become quickly disappointed. Not even 24 hours had gone by before Latham was out doing what he does best — trumping conservative John Howard on spending initiatives. Howard now finds himself confronted by Latham's Medicare-Gold free hospital care for silver tops.
I don't wish to deny that John Howard does not have any achievements to his credit. Supporting the US in the world-wide fight against terror is one of which he should be justly proud of. Turning the screws on the communist unions that had crippled our ports is another.
But I have a problem which I believe many other conservatives do so as well with the fact that John Howard's government is the highest spending, largest taxing government in the history of the federation. And now he wants to spend more.
I tell a tale when I say I want John Howard to lose only because the alternative is just too awful and horrible to contemplate. But it sickens me to think that the party whose ideology is supposed to be small government and low taxes goes out of its way to turn its back against these important political principles.
Now I know that John Howard's $6 billion splurge can be defended on the grounds that it is spread out over four years, and that $1.5 billion a year out of a $800 billion a year economy doesn't amount to much, statistically speaking. But this view overlooks the unfortunate fact that spending never seems to permanently fall as a proportion of GDP.
In any case, it's silly politics for John Howard to try and imitate labor on spending — or as I have called the Liberals in the past — "Labor Light". There is a large rump of electors in the blessed country who do believe in lower taxes and less government spending, at least as a proportion of GDP, if only they could trust a John Howard to follow this policy.
Howard must have advisors telling him that he needs to spend money if he is going to get re-elected. I believe this is the wrong advice for many reasons. Staying true to the conservative principles would be a much more effective way of getting re-elected.
What a refreshing surprise it would be if John Howard rather than promising us a blather of new spending had come out on that weekend and said that as a conservative he was not going to follow Labor down the spending lane because it would eventually lead to disaster for this country. He would therefore ask for a mandate based on smaller government and no new spending initiatives.
The current surplus rightly belongs to those hard working Australian who were taxed to create it. Therefore Howard should return it to them in the form of lower taxes. Howard is committing a fatal error by going down the high spending, high taxation route.
Moreover, John Howard knows that surpluses cannot fund recurrent expenditure, only taxes can do that. This means that once the surpluses disappear, and they will eventually, taxes would have to rise. Even worse, when the next recession arrives spending will have to be maintained even though tax revenues will shrink.
As for the stupid left, they seems to think that they can win because the Australian people don't want us to be involved against the war on terror or because they have been taken in by silly stories that John Howard lied about children being hurled out of a boat into the water.
As always, the left is wrong. The only way the left can win is if the John Howard Government completely loses its principles and starts to think that Labor's economic proposals are worth stealing. It is only then that the electorate might start to think that it ought to vote in the real thing rather than Labor light.
As conservatives we need to ask ourselves why the John Howard is essentially neck and neck with Labor (and let us not forget that the Libs are politically prostrate in every state) during a time of strong economic expansion and a successful war — despite what lefty journalists assert — against terrorism.
I and many other conservatives seem to think that the real reason is high spending, high taxing polices of this government has made it very vulnerable against Labor whose leader seems unhinged. It's about time that John Howard began to shore up his conservative principles.
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Joe Cambria was a Wall Street trader for 15 years.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 4 October 2004