Demint making friends
Over at AEI Senator Demint appears to have made a critic.While the author does have some points,it is obvious to any who pays attention that Jim Demint is flat out one of the top five Senators in the nation and he is second only to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn when it comes to Fiscal Conservatism
The Senate’s Fiscal Conservatism
By Philip Wallach
The permanent campaign has driven a wedge between rhetoric and reality when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Politicians of all stripes offer eager assurances that they will be responsible stewards of the budget, while also promising the services and reduced taxes their constituents demand. Voters like the sound of getting more for less, and are willing to overlook the glaring contradiction such promises entail, because they are able to unreflectively force the costs of their actions onto future generations.
For those who would argue that the foregoing proposition is needlessly gloomy, there happens to be a readily available (and surprisingly unexploited) source of data about where lawmakers say they stand on the issues: their official websites. In this forum, lawmakers have an opportunity to communicate directly with voters, free from media or opponent spin. Having visited all one hundred senators’ sites (six of which I deemed to be basically “substance-free”), I found that 56 of the 94 remaining senators made unequivocal statements to the effect of being fiscal conservatives. This claim transcended party lines, with 20 Democrats, 35 Republicans, and the lone independent all expressing their concern quite robustly. Eleven more senators (two Democrats, nine Republicans) were borderline cases, alluding to their sense of fiscal responsibility without ever supplying much substance to their claims.
Of course, not everyone invoked the phrase “fiscal conservative.” The locutions employed varied from the unintentionally comic (Senator Mike Crapo [R-ID] acts responsibly because his “naturally fiscally conservative nature” compels him to) to the folksy (Senator John Thune [R-SD] declares that “Washington needs to start living within its means.”) to the boastful (at least eight senators claim to be leaders in the field). Former Presidential hopeful John Kerry (D-MA) achieves the highest sense of gravitas, intoning, “Restoring fiscal responsibility in Washington matters to everyone who cares about our future. Whether or not Washington musters even a shred of fiscal discipline will help decide our economic future.”
This is all too true, of course, but unfortunately the federal government will need to muster considerably more than a shred of self-restraint if future generations (read: all Americans under 35) are not to find themselves paying taxes in a nation weighed down hopelessly in burdensome debt during their prime earning years. Most people don’t realize it, but even if we had no deficits today we would still have a serious long-term problem. Although they don’t help, our current woes are caused not by President Bush’s tax cuts or Congress’s pork addiction. Rather, our woes are caused by the juggernaut entitlement programs that both parties, apparently, have come to accept as political fact: Medicare, Social Security, and the less ensconced but equally menacing Medicaid. The projected growth of these programs means that our current fiscal imbalance could only be corrected by massive tax increases or massive entitlement reform, neither of which has any political constituency.
The problem, then, is not that there are senators left who, inexplicably, don’t make any claims of fiscal restraint. I suspect that at this particular moment, most everyone would be willing to self-apply the label of “fiscal conservative” if confronted. The problem is that our permanent campaign, from which senators should hypothetically be insulated by their six-year terms, has made hypocrites out of nearly all those who claim to be deeply concerned about our budgetary woes.
With just two exceptions—Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and Arizona Senator John McCain—every senator’s website emphasizes local spending to various degrees, with five senators (two Democrats, three Republicans) making this their site’s central focus. Jim DeMint (R-SC), to pick on one senator, created a “Democrat Spendometer,” a poster he brought to the floor of the Senate to show just how wasteful the Democrats were in crafting their budget proposals. “We need to wake up,” Senator DeMint’s site declares, continuing, “We can’t just keep spending and taxing.” Having said this, however, Senator DeMint’s press releases announce multi-million dollar grants for South Carolina’s fire and police departments, which are not exactly hallmarks of a legislator out to shrink the federal government.
While the “spendometer” stunt is particularly obnoxious, Senator DeMint is hardly an outlier when it comes to having a double standard. Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) says, “I am also dedicated to balancing the budget and paying off the national debt, which will keep interest rates low and benefit the economy.” He also says, “Arkansas Comes First is more than just a sign on my desk,” and is sure to note that “agriculture plays a defining role in our economy.” Senator Pryor supports subsidizing teacher pay and is dead-set against base closings in his state. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), lately an object of ridicule for his defense of the “bridge to nowhere,” is no different from most senators when he insists that spending projects for Alaska are equal (more equal, even) to those for other states.
Of course, local spending need not conflict with a responsible budget, and any savvy politician will want to tout the federal spending they bring to their constituents. It is just good politics to do so. The painfully obvious consequence of this is that every senator takes a stand for their state, bristling at the idea of cuts, and spending invariably ratchets everupward. It seems that senators can restrain themselves fiscally only once they have already spent enough on their constituents to ensure easy reelection, to which incumbents in this country have come to feel entitled.
Several Republican senators have evolved what may be the most campaign-savvy message when it comes to the budget. This group tells voters that if we would only cut taxes enough, revenues would grow so quickly that we could have a bonanza of spending without going into the red. Senator Conrad Burns’s (R-MT) site, for example, manages to say the following all in one breath: “With a seat on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Burns has been able to bring in over $1 billion in federal funds to the state since he took office. He has been a champion of a fiscally conservative government and a strong voice for lower taxes to create new businesses and more jobs.” Even the most cursory examination of the long-term prospects of the federal budget discovers that this Norquistian worldview is nothing but a puerile fantasy. The only real rationale for such a policy in light of projections of future entitlement growth (non-discriminatory spending) is that we want to adopt a policy of redistribution from future taxpayers to present ones. Put in these terms, however, voters might start questioning just how necessary various spending projects of today really are instead of clamoring incessantly for more.
Meanwhile, there are precious few senators willing to take the plunge and address these topics with the gravity they deserve. Only Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) makes entitlement reform, probably the single most important challenge facing the federal government, one of his most prominent goals. And in terms of voting behavior—in the end, far more important than all of this rhetoric—few senators are willing to risk being attacked as withholding dollars from their constituents. Just four senators—John Cornyn (R-TX), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), McCain, and Gregg—were willing to vote against the famously bloated transportation bill this past summer, and the President (who, though you wouldn’t know it from his behavior, doesn’t need to win reelection ever again) balked at his promise to veto it.
The media’s current spate of attention to the budget is laudable, but everyone should realize that it isn’t a victory to make our senators tell us that they are fiscally responsible. They know this is what we want to hear, and they are perfectly willing to tell it to us. All talk about the budget is disingenuous, or at least extremely poorly considered, if we vote for senators who are only willing to pay lip service to this crisis without acting. Unless they are content to mortgage the future of younger generations, the American people need to start voting for politicians willing to put their lack of money where their mouths are.
Philip Wallach is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
Author’s Note: After the publication of this piece, Senator Jim DeMint’s staff convinced me that I was unduly critical of their boss and his website, which does have some excellent material on entitlement reform. The great thing about websites (and voting records) is that readers can go see for themselves. P.W.
The Senate’s Fiscal Conservatism
By Philip Wallach
The permanent campaign has driven a wedge between rhetoric and reality when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Politicians of all stripes offer eager assurances that they will be responsible stewards of the budget, while also promising the services and reduced taxes their constituents demand. Voters like the sound of getting more for less, and are willing to overlook the glaring contradiction such promises entail, because they are able to unreflectively force the costs of their actions onto future generations.
For those who would argue that the foregoing proposition is needlessly gloomy, there happens to be a readily available (and surprisingly unexploited) source of data about where lawmakers say they stand on the issues: their official websites. In this forum, lawmakers have an opportunity to communicate directly with voters, free from media or opponent spin. Having visited all one hundred senators’ sites (six of which I deemed to be basically “substance-free”), I found that 56 of the 94 remaining senators made unequivocal statements to the effect of being fiscal conservatives. This claim transcended party lines, with 20 Democrats, 35 Republicans, and the lone independent all expressing their concern quite robustly. Eleven more senators (two Democrats, nine Republicans) were borderline cases, alluding to their sense of fiscal responsibility without ever supplying much substance to their claims.
Of course, not everyone invoked the phrase “fiscal conservative.” The locutions employed varied from the unintentionally comic (Senator Mike Crapo [R-ID] acts responsibly because his “naturally fiscally conservative nature” compels him to) to the folksy (Senator John Thune [R-SD] declares that “Washington needs to start living within its means.”) to the boastful (at least eight senators claim to be leaders in the field). Former Presidential hopeful John Kerry (D-MA) achieves the highest sense of gravitas, intoning, “Restoring fiscal responsibility in Washington matters to everyone who cares about our future. Whether or not Washington musters even a shred of fiscal discipline will help decide our economic future.”
This is all too true, of course, but unfortunately the federal government will need to muster considerably more than a shred of self-restraint if future generations (read: all Americans under 35) are not to find themselves paying taxes in a nation weighed down hopelessly in burdensome debt during their prime earning years. Most people don’t realize it, but even if we had no deficits today we would still have a serious long-term problem. Although they don’t help, our current woes are caused not by President Bush’s tax cuts or Congress’s pork addiction. Rather, our woes are caused by the juggernaut entitlement programs that both parties, apparently, have come to accept as political fact: Medicare, Social Security, and the less ensconced but equally menacing Medicaid. The projected growth of these programs means that our current fiscal imbalance could only be corrected by massive tax increases or massive entitlement reform, neither of which has any political constituency.
The problem, then, is not that there are senators left who, inexplicably, don’t make any claims of fiscal restraint. I suspect that at this particular moment, most everyone would be willing to self-apply the label of “fiscal conservative” if confronted. The problem is that our permanent campaign, from which senators should hypothetically be insulated by their six-year terms, has made hypocrites out of nearly all those who claim to be deeply concerned about our budgetary woes.
With just two exceptions—Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and Arizona Senator John McCain—every senator’s website emphasizes local spending to various degrees, with five senators (two Democrats, three Republicans) making this their site’s central focus. Jim DeMint (R-SC), to pick on one senator, created a “Democrat Spendometer,” a poster he brought to the floor of the Senate to show just how wasteful the Democrats were in crafting their budget proposals. “We need to wake up,” Senator DeMint’s site declares, continuing, “We can’t just keep spending and taxing.” Having said this, however, Senator DeMint’s press releases announce multi-million dollar grants for South Carolina’s fire and police departments, which are not exactly hallmarks of a legislator out to shrink the federal government.
While the “spendometer” stunt is particularly obnoxious, Senator DeMint is hardly an outlier when it comes to having a double standard. Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) says, “I am also dedicated to balancing the budget and paying off the national debt, which will keep interest rates low and benefit the economy.” He also says, “Arkansas Comes First is more than just a sign on my desk,” and is sure to note that “agriculture plays a defining role in our economy.” Senator Pryor supports subsidizing teacher pay and is dead-set against base closings in his state. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), lately an object of ridicule for his defense of the “bridge to nowhere,” is no different from most senators when he insists that spending projects for Alaska are equal (more equal, even) to those for other states.
Of course, local spending need not conflict with a responsible budget, and any savvy politician will want to tout the federal spending they bring to their constituents. It is just good politics to do so. The painfully obvious consequence of this is that every senator takes a stand for their state, bristling at the idea of cuts, and spending invariably ratchets everupward. It seems that senators can restrain themselves fiscally only once they have already spent enough on their constituents to ensure easy reelection, to which incumbents in this country have come to feel entitled.
Several Republican senators have evolved what may be the most campaign-savvy message when it comes to the budget. This group tells voters that if we would only cut taxes enough, revenues would grow so quickly that we could have a bonanza of spending without going into the red. Senator Conrad Burns’s (R-MT) site, for example, manages to say the following all in one breath: “With a seat on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Burns has been able to bring in over $1 billion in federal funds to the state since he took office. He has been a champion of a fiscally conservative government and a strong voice for lower taxes to create new businesses and more jobs.” Even the most cursory examination of the long-term prospects of the federal budget discovers that this Norquistian worldview is nothing but a puerile fantasy. The only real rationale for such a policy in light of projections of future entitlement growth (non-discriminatory spending) is that we want to adopt a policy of redistribution from future taxpayers to present ones. Put in these terms, however, voters might start questioning just how necessary various spending projects of today really are instead of clamoring incessantly for more.
Meanwhile, there are precious few senators willing to take the plunge and address these topics with the gravity they deserve. Only Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) makes entitlement reform, probably the single most important challenge facing the federal government, one of his most prominent goals. And in terms of voting behavior—in the end, far more important than all of this rhetoric—few senators are willing to risk being attacked as withholding dollars from their constituents. Just four senators—John Cornyn (R-TX), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), McCain, and Gregg—were willing to vote against the famously bloated transportation bill this past summer, and the President (who, though you wouldn’t know it from his behavior, doesn’t need to win reelection ever again) balked at his promise to veto it.
The media’s current spate of attention to the budget is laudable, but everyone should realize that it isn’t a victory to make our senators tell us that they are fiscally responsible. They know this is what we want to hear, and they are perfectly willing to tell it to us. All talk about the budget is disingenuous, or at least extremely poorly considered, if we vote for senators who are only willing to pay lip service to this crisis without acting. Unless they are content to mortgage the future of younger generations, the American people need to start voting for politicians willing to put their lack of money where their mouths are.
Philip Wallach is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
Author’s Note: After the publication of this piece, Senator Jim DeMint’s staff convinced me that I was unduly critical of their boss and his website, which does have some excellent material on entitlement reform. The great thing about websites (and voting records) is that readers can go see for themselves. P.W.
posted by SCGOP at 2:43 PM
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