Dem Promises Vs. Fiscal Reality

It's pretty funny really.

When I clicked on the WashTimes story Democrats can't afford '08 promises, right next to it up popped an ad asking, "Do you know your credit score?" I may not know mine, but I know what the national credit score will be if the Dems get elected: Low and falling lower.

If you thought W was bad for never vetoing a spending bill, think of what will happen when the spending bills are dreamed up in the Oval Office.

All the major Dem Prez-seekers have big plans for spending their way into the White House, and all of them have a popular way to pay for them. I'll let the guy with the monster house in the Carolina woods and the bank account stuffed with other peoples' money stolen earned during his legal career speak for the nearly matched set:

"I've got a way to pay for it," [John Edwards] boasted at the Service Employees International Union conference this week. "Let's get rid of George Bush's tax cuts for people who make over $200,000 a year."

The trouble is, that won't generate nearly enough to pay for Edwards' $120 billion health care plan, or Hil's bundle of new plans estimated to cost $170 billion, or Obama's give-aways, which start with a $50 billion health care plan. (Obama does promise a balanced budget, but good luck doing it if the economy shrinks, as it probably will, following Dem tax hikes on business and the wealthy.)

One little thing Clintbamawards fails to point out is that the Bush cuts are due to expire in 2010 unless Congress extends them -- and the current Congress won't -- so it's hardly truthful for these wannabes to declare their tax cut-cutting ways to be leadership.

And then there's the balancing of the books to deal with. WashTimes pegs the immediate revenue gain from cutting the cuts at $55 billion -- a $55 billion that's being spent, re-spent and recycled by the Dem Prez-seekers, with Hil the money-blowing queen:

At a recent cancer forum, Mrs. Clinton said she would "double" the National Institute of Health's $28 billion budget and the National Cancer Institute's nearly $5 billion budget over 10 years. After the Minnesota bridge collapse last month, she proposed spending $1.5 billion per year for public transit and $10 billion over 10 years to redesign and reconstruct ailing bridges.

Her universal pre-kindergarten plan would cost $5 billion the first year and $10 billion after five years. She has proposed $1 billion to help at-risk mortgage borrowers avoid foreclosure. Smaller-ticket items range from $25 million for cancer-survivor groups to $36 million for school physical-education programs.

Faced with deficits and trying to at least put a happy face on their campaign promises, the successful Dem candidate will be forced to look elsewhere for money. Look for more taxes, more fees, big defense cuts, reductions in democracy-building foreign policies (which are far too threadbare already), other disastrous fiscal and foreign policies,and a rising deficit.

Don't trouble the Dem voters with such harsh realities. After all, they'll be able to feel good and self-righteous about pre-kindergarteners skipping off school for free, even if it means they've just nationalized a perfectly functioning service industry.

Fighting Pork: Now More Than Ever

Scroll through the lists of Congressional pork projects, from pickle museums to bridges to nowhere, and you'll find one common thread that neatly ties them all together: Newness.

Members of Congress like to bestow on their districts shiny new gifts, at the expense of dreary, boring infrastructure maintenance projects. Maintenance isn't sexy, but as we learned in Minneapolis this week, it sure is necessary.

The I-35 W bridge was, ironically, undergoing maintenance when it collapsed, but there is still very much a point to be made here. The maintenance project, as I recall, was costing something in the neighborhood of $14 million; in other words, it was a routine affair, not what was needed to lift the bridge out of deficiency and into safety.

The sorts of repairs -- rebuilding, really -- the bridge required are not inexpensive:

Concern about bridge safety has increased in the wake of that bridge span collapse in Minnesota, and figures show that repairing all bridges considered structurally deficient would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion. That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. (source)

The federal government is now providing about $40 billion a year to improve and expand the nation's highways and bridges -- but that's new construction and maintenance, and highways eat up a lot of the maintenance budget. Plus, there's no guarantee even these funding levels will be sustained in future transportation bills.

Congress should wake up. Bridges, sewer systems, water systems and other non-sexy items they should view as mission-critical to their task of taking care of America are in disrepair and are more important than, say,

• $4,500,000 for a bandage component that utilizes compounds found in shrimp heads, or
• $9,500,000 for the Extended ColdWeather Clothing System, or
• $1.35 million for the “Obesity in the Military Research Program” or
• $5.5 million for the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center. (source)

I'm sure Ernie's heirs have the wherewithal to foot that bill themselves.

In making this point, am I no different than the lefty maniacs who blame the bridge failure on Bush and the Iraq war, pointing out, as I do about pork, that the trillions spent on Iraq could have been spent on bridges?

No, not at all. As I said, repairing our infrastructure is mission-critical to taking care of America, as is meeting the Islamist war against us head-on. Pork doesn't fit in with these budget priorities.

By some accounts, we've blown over $250 billion on pork since 1991. The cost of bringing all the deficient bridges out of deficiency is estimated at $188 billion. Which do you think would be the more intelligent way to spend money?

The Decline Of The Tax Fighter

The taxpayer, said Ronald Reagan, is someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take a civil service examination.

Richard Nixon rallied the GOP troops with his famous line, “It is time to get big government off your back and out of your pocket.”

Tax-fighting has been good for the GOP, bringing us back to majorities in 1946 and 1994, but its clout as a political tool may be changing ... at least by one Dem analysis by Mark Mellman in The Hill, who defiantly proclaims, "The taxman doesn't scare us any more!"

Mellman's point is based on polls so a bit of caution is required, but he's pulled data from numerous polls over a number of years, so his argument is worthy of attention.

While no one wants to pay more taxes, the perceived burden has diminished. Earlier this month, 53 percent of respondents told Gallup the amount they paid in federal income tax was too high. Though still a majority, it represents a significant decline from the two-thirds who thought their taxes were too high in the late ’90s. In 1993, 67 percent of Americans told Harris they “had reached the breaking point on the amount of taxes they paid.” A decade later that figure dropped by 15 points. CBS found 49 percent saying they paid more than their fair share in 1997, but just 37 percent taking that position this month.

While at times the level of taxation has moved to the forefront of public concern, more often voters have been fixated on two other aspects of the issue: the waste of their tax dollars and the failure of big business and the wealthy to pay their fair share.

There's a lot at work in these two paragraphs.

First, globalization and free trade, which are not exactly home runs for the Dems, have lowered the cost of goods, and tax cuts have lowered the tax burdens for most Americans. Together, these two GOP policies have increased spendable income, making the tax burden relatively less onerous. Ironically, rather than thank the GOP and keep the fight up for low taxation, the American people are responding by saying, "Hey, this isn't all that bad after all." An open door for the Dems.

Government waste, long a strong suit for the GOP is now the Dems' game, thanks to the drunken sailor spending of the first six years of the Bush presidency. I have every confidence, as has been borne out in their first 100 days, that the Dems will probably do worse, but for the moment, they own the high ground. (It's comforting to go back and read Mellman's headline. If they're not afraid any more, they're likely to go far too far.)

And finally, their harping on two Americas and CEO salaries has paid off. They've shifted the focus from taxes to those who don't pay taxes. Not the low-end cheats, mind you, but the few, the fabulous, the glitterati tax dodgers. Implication: Republicans.

OK. So there's a new reality and it may have come into being by a Grand Scheme by the Dems; more likely, they're just happy with the happenstance. What we need to really pay attention to is the crux of the new tax reality:

A Fox News poll put the question directly: “What bothers you more — how much you pay in taxes or how your taxes are spent?” Only 12 percent emphasized the amount paid, whereas 71 percent cited waste as the primary villain.

Maldistribution of the burden is taxpayers’ other prime complaint. Two-thirds told Gallup this month that “upper income people” pay too little in taxes, while 71 percent complained about corporations paying too little.

Mellman reads this and says the Dems have "once again wrested control of the tax issue away from the GOP, with Democrats now seen as the party better able to deal with the issue by margins of 8 to 14 points."

The two issues are entirely different, though. I'll concede the first to Mellman; the Dems are very good at convincing the American people, despite all the facts that stand in their way, that upper income people pay too little in taxes, and Republicans are to blame for this "fact."

Our response to this is simple, and it's not numbers. We can say "the top X% pay Y% of the taxes" all day long and lose this battle, because the story has to be humanized, not numerilized (if there is such a word). There are plenty of rich and prominent Dems who are not paying their fair share of taxes. It's the GOPs job to get dirty and drag these people into the limelight, so the Dems lose their ability to make a credible argument on the point.

The other point, waste, has until the last six years been the GOP's strong point. As fighters for small government and perpetual challengers of waste, we could always tackle a donkey or two at election time by pointing to pork.

The Dems are in power in large part because the GOP lost focus on this core value, but the core value is still there. The GOP is the small government party, and it's time to elect people who will stand by the small government pledge. It will be much easier for us to find and elect candidates who believe in small government than it will for the Dems.

Then the Dems can be as unafraid of the taxman as they want, as they get drubbed by that other public servant, the waste collector.

hat-tip: Real Clear Politics