WhatFinger


The public doesn't want it to happen

Let's be honest about the real reason Congress won't cut spending



Let's be honest about the real reason Congress won't cut spending One of the most delusional conceits of "true conservatives" is that, if only all Republicans were principled like they are, we could get spending under control. It's a hell of a burden to be among the few, the proud, the philosophically pure while everyone else mouths conservative platitudes while secretly harboring dreams of a big-government regime that controls our every thought and action. That is not how it works, and that is not why conservative dreams of spending restraint never seem to come to fruitition.
Conservatives lose these policy battles because conservatives have lost the battle for the minds of the voters. The result of this is that Republicans can occasionally take control of Congress, and sometimes of all aspects of the federal government, but they do not believe they'd be operating under the consent of the governed if they tore the whole thing down. And they're right. They wouldn't be. Consider for a moment the electoral map. Let's just focus on the Senate. There are currently 51 Republican senators, among them senators elected to represent Maine, Colorado, Alaska, Nevada, Iowa and Wisconsin - all states that either voted Democrat in one or the last three presidential elections, or in the case of Alaska, had a major need for federal support of its budget. Even many red states are more dependent on federal largese than its Republican legislators would suggest to you in their rhetoric. Even some of the most conservative senators and representatives - the people who complain long and loud about federal spending - make sure their states and districts get their share of the federal pie. None want to explain to their voters why they unilaterally disarmed in the fight for federal crumbs while other states and districts saw the bacon brought home. And that's because they know their voters expect to get some of that bacon. They want the highway funds. They want the Medicaid grants. They want the train stations and the bike trails and everything else you read about in the press releases when their supposed spending-hawk senators and representatives announce what a lovely slice of the pie they'll be bringing home. Are there Republicans in Maine who are conservative enough slash the size of the federal government? Sure they are. The voters of Maine don't want them. They want Susan Collins, so we get Susan Collins.

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Heck, there are Republicans in Massachusetts who are conservative enough to do this. You could beat up the Massachusetts Republican Party if you want to make sure these people get nominated for Senate and House seats. The voters of Massachusetts don't want them. The voters of Ohio don't want people like this either. They want people who think like John Kasich and Rob Portman. There are plenty of senators and representatives who are conservative enough to support a radical downsizing of the federal government. But there isn't a majority because the electorate by-and-large isn't conservative enough to give us one. The Senate always has to lop the likes of Susan Collins, John McCain, Cory Gardner and Lisa Murkowski on top of the real conservatives just to get to a bare majority. The House needs those isolate Republican districts in California and New York to get a Republican majority, and as we saw during the tax cut vote, they'll vote what they perceive to be the interests of their own states rather than get behind a philosophical revolution. You can lament this all you want, but it's the nature of politics that politicians will almost never get behind a radical restructuring of government if the public doesn't want it. And the public doesn't want this. It should. We're careening toward national bankruptcy and the public is shrugging its collective shoulders at it. A national debt of $20 trillion seems so hard to comprehend it almost can't be real. The average guy who's trying to pay his mortgage and send his kids to college doesn't know how to begin getting his brain around a figure like this or what it means. Try explaining to him that we have to deal with more than $100 trillion in unfunded Medicare obligations too, and he'll just check out and turn on some music. I don't blame him.

The fact of the matter is that conservatives lost the public on this issue in the 1990s, largely because they assumed they had won it for all time. Two Reagan terms of low taxes and rocket-fueled economic growth, along with all the classic Reagan rhetoric about reducing the size of governnment, told conservatives that all they had to do was talk about how government is too big, and taxes and spends too much, and they would win elections. Three for three in the '80s. You can't argue with that. But Democrats and the media didn't just roll over and concede this fight. They battled it on the economic front - encouraging and fostering class envy - and they battled it on the cultural front, arguing that all conservatives were robber-baron prudes who wanted to leave you poor and destitute while controlling everything from your sex life to your freedom to drink beer. Republicans just kept talking about tax cuts, and railing against spending in the abstract while doing nothing about it practice. Free-market economics is not something people understand intuitively. Every generation needs it explained to them, and it helps if you have appealing spokesmen like Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp doing the explaining. While Democrats were finding their voice with the charming if morally repugnant Bill Clinton and a cadre of imitators, the leaders of the conservative movement started to sound angry and stern - but for the right price you could join them on a cruise! Or you could buy the use of their mailing lists. Or you could book them through their speakers' bureaus. Somewhere along the line the conservative movement decided its ideas had already been proven right, so it stopped persuading and started finding way to pat itself on the back for money. And the culture drifted in other directions.


At some point the public is going to figure out we're heading for the brink of fiscal calamity, probably just before it actually happens and it's no longer possible for the media to ignore it in favor of puff pieces celebrating the cute North Korean equivalent of Joseph Goebbels. By that time, spending cuts will be harsh, painful and devastating for far too many people. Today we're spending 69 percent of the federal budget on payments to individuals, and another 7 percent on interest on the national debt. That leaves only 22 percent of the budget for actual governance. Most of the public doesn't know this. That's in part because Democrats and the media don't want them to, and in part because conservatives are too busy trying to book you on cruises to make the case for a governing philosophy they're annoyed that you agreed with in the '80s and no longer do. So we spend. Because that's what the public wants. Because in fairness to the public, almost who's in a position to explain how things really are is interested in doing so, and those who try are so ham-handed and ineffective that you can hardly blame them for listening. Turn the public around and the rest takes care of itself.

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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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