Conservatism, Um, Evolving

Congressional Republicans must assume they will never be in the minority and vulnerable to payback. They are mistaken.

NEWSWEEK

Dec. 8 issue — By the time the conservatives running Congress and this conservative president are done doing what they think will win the next election, tweezers may be needed to pick up the remnants of conservatism as traditionally understood. Time was, Republicans disdained the political formula supposedly voiced by FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins: “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” Now Republicans have amended the formula with an audacity that would make the most ardent New Dealer blush.

THE REPUBLICAN RECIPE for “elect and elect” is:

Tax cuts. Fine. They have carried the economy through a difficult patch. But there is also unbridled spending. (Federal discretionary spending is up a dizzying 26 percent in two years.) Plus tariffs. Which are taxes on American consumers. The most recent, ostensibly intended to save American jobs, protects Americans from, among other dangers, an inundation of inexpensive Chinese bras.

Plus what liberals call “industrial policy” and conservatives used to call “lemon socialism”—loan guarantees, wrinkles in the tax code and other subsidies to private enterprises that evidently cannot prosper in the market without corporate welfare.

Plus the largest expansion of an entitlement since Medicare was enacted 38 years ago. The price put on the prescription-drug benefit—$400 billion over 10 years—is (a) a guess that everyone finds it convenient to accept, (b) probably low for the coming decade and (c) perhaps one fifth the cost of its second decade.

More...