For a generation or more many conservatives have hoped (and even believed) that one of the most beneficial effects of tax cuts (and for many, their main purpose) is to reduce or at least restrain the size of government.
“Starving the beast” is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to use budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government….
Prior to being elected as the President, then-candidate Ronald Reagan foreshadowed the strategy during the 1980 US Presidential debates, saying “John Anderson tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”
Reagan cut taxes, but Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, refused to cut spending. As a result, The Beast didn’t starve; he just went into debt.
In almost every respect, Obama is the Anti-Reagan. And one of the most important of those respect is what might be called his Force-Feed The Beast strategy to increase the size and scope of the federal government. The theory, at least as strongly implied by the policies being proposed, is that if expensive program is piled on top of expensive program (“stimulus,” cap and trade, health “reform,” wealth transfers to the third world to curb global warming, etc., etc.), Congress will eventually have to increase taxes to pay for them.
Although its advocates have been reluctant to admit what they’re doing, their Force-Feed The Beast strategy has not gone completely unnoticed. Thus Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal today. Given the low and still-plummeting popularity of health care reform, she asks, “why the stubborn insistence” on passing it?
Think big. The liberal wing of the party — the Barney Franks, the David Obeys — are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.
…. They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.
What’s extraordinary is that more Democrats have not wised up to the fact that they are being used as pawns in this larger liberal game.
Actually, many of them are wise to it (if using “wise” in the same sentence with “Democrats” is not oxymoronic). Ms. Strassel quotes Colorado freshman Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, for example who told CNN that he’d vote for Obama’s health care reform even if it cost him his job. And my Congressman, first (and last)-termer Tom Perriello (D, Virginia 5th), who won by about 600 votes in 2008 in a district carried by McCain and in which in our just-completed governor’s race Republican McConnell defeated Democrat Deeds by 61% to 38%, surely knows that his support for health care reform, on top of his support for the stimulus and cap and trade, is almost certain to grease the slide for his return to private life.
These Democrats are not dumb, at least not in the sense of being unaware that they are probably sacrificing themselves for the benefit of their party.
Alas, I suspect their sacrifice will be in vain. Even if health reform passes, even if the debt and deficit continue to spiral upward, future Congresses, especially if filled with Republicans who owe their seats to the unpopularity of all the Democratic debt- and deficit-fueling spending, will be as unwilling to raise taxes as past Congresses were to cut spending after Reagan’s tax cuts.
The Beast, in short, is strong. He survives both starving and force-feeding.
