Can You Trust Conservatives
The wife of a liberal friend of mine recently asked some sincere questions trying to figure out conservatives, and so I thought I would address them. I will do the political question here and the more religiously oriented ones in the near future at my other blog, www.consider.org/blog. Her politically oriented question concerned the statement of House Speaker Boehner on Jobs. Given the very strong emphasis during the campaign focusing on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” how is it now, after the election, when it was pointed out that the cuts the conservatives are proposing could result in the loss of jobs, he can say, “so be it.”
While at first blush, this may seem to be a contradiction, when considered in the larger context, it is not hard to reconcile. For many conservatives, as I detail in the added chapter of the paperback version of Preserving Democracy, the economic downturn was caused by government intervention which created the housing bubble. It was aggravated by a change in the accounting rules that went into effect Nov 15, 2007, and proved so disastrous that it was repealed in early 2009, unfortunately after it had done tremendous damage to the economy.
Since TARP, all the bailouts and the various stimulus plans did not address these root causes, they did not help. In fact the massive deficits they ran up combined with the uncertainty caused by the explosive growth in government over the last couple of years, only made things worse. Rather than getting things under control, Obama’s new budget increases the deficit even further to $1.6 trillion. This is ten times larger than the budget produced by the last Republican Congress just 4 years ago.
Thus, right or wrong, Conservatives believe that the unprecedented deficits threaten economic collapse. In such an environment, people are not focused on growing what they have but rather, are just trying to preserve it so they do not lose any more. People are reluctant make major purchases. Banks are reluctant to make loans. Investors are not investing in new companies. Existing businesses are reluctant to hire. In short, the economy cannot grow.
The focus here is not on the big corporations, those with lots of lobbyists, or with CEOs that hobnob with Obama and thus were able to siphon off large chunks of the TARP/Bailout/Stimulus dollars that Washington has been handing out. Rather, the focus is on all the small businesses across the country. Companies that do not live off the largess of the government. Companies that never saw, and will never see, a dime of stimulus money. These are the businesses that will need to create the jobs to get unemployment down. Yet they are struggling to make ends meet, assuming of course that they have not already failed. They receive no help from the government, but instead are only further burdened by the all the new regulations that the ever expanding government generates.
Given this background, Conservatives believe that a critical step in turning around the economy is to reign in the size of government and bring these deficits under control, so that confidence can be restored to the economy, so that it can begin to grow and create jobs again.
Conservatives do not believe this can be done with taxes, for two main reasons. First taxes would only further increase the burden on the economy dragging it down even more. This is especially true given that many small businesses are taxed in the income range that democrats consider “the rich.” In addition to this, the current deficit is so large that any tax increase what would be large enough to make a serious dent would kill any economic growth and throw us even deeper into economic problems. Second, the history of tax increases is pretty clear. They normally do not bring in as much as expected, and politicians just increase spending even more.
In short, Conservatives do not believe we have an income problem; we have a spending problem. Any real solution will have to focus primarily on cutting spending. This is why they not only ran on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but also getting spending under control. For Conservatives these two goals are strongly linked.
Given this background, Boehner was asked at his weekly news conference about the possibility that federal jobs might be cut if they go ahead with the proposed cuts to the federal budget. He responded that,
“Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We’re broke. It’s time for us to get serious about how we’re spending the nation’s money.”
Democrats may consider this insensitive, but the fact is that we are broke. In 2010, the Federal government took in $2.2 trillion, yet spends $3.5 trillion. This means that we are spending nearly 60% more than we are taking in. Obama’s proposed budget for this year is even worse. Thus some federal jobs almost certainly will be lost as the Federal budget is cut, but the budget needs to be cut if we are to avoid the financial disaster that is looming, and if the private sector is ever going to recover. Thus Boehner’s statement was not one said out of insensitivity, but out of a concern for the larger problem, and the need to deal with it before things get much worse. Or put another way, the short term pain of federal jobs loss, is necessary for the long term gain of a strong and growing economy, and economy that can create the “ jobs, jobs, jobs” needed to bring down the unemployment rate.
