Repuglican Views

Almost exactly six months before the elections, I've just come across some good (if wonky) stuff on or about trouble for the Right.

1. Mark Schmitt's handicapping the prospective GOP presidential candidates for 2008 in the TPMCafe, e.g.,

John McCain. I’ve said enough about McCain recently. Some people believe he’s the inevitable nominee; others believe it’s impossible, because too many conservatives are just dead-set against him. I’m in the second camp.

After dismissing six other possibilities, Schmitt mentions Newt Gingrich as a gray-horse candidate. For my money, this looks to mean that the 2008 GOP field is open to a old-fashioned outsider, perhaps a state governor - a la Clinton in 1992. Can we Minnesotans dare hope for our hockey-playing golden boy, Tim Pawlenty? Oh, that would be great. (Summarized and found on Political Animal.)

2. Over at the Cato Institute, presidential advisor David Frum analyzes the end of a dream: the passing of "the fairest opportunity in half a century to reduce the size and cost of the federal government" - a situation which is bad for small-gubmint conservatives but good for the rest of us. (Well, NSA aside...) As Sam Rosenfeld says at TAPPED, it's unlikely that the conservatives who were honestly interested in "starving the beast" were ever very numerous: after all, Congress has been full of hundreds of nominally small-government conservatives over the past decade, and look at what happened. For an explanation of that curious paradox, it's worth looking at...

3. A new study by Cato (of all places) which finds that, according to Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic,

judging by the last twenty-five years (plenty of time for a fair test), a tax cut of 1 percent of the GDP increases the rate of spending growth by about 0.15 percent of the GDP a year. A comparable tax hike reduces spending growth by the same amount.

Why? Because when you cut taxes, citizens effectively pay for less of what the government's doing - the unpaid-for remainder is usually covered by deficit spending, not eliminated. Pork is awful tasty. If you raise taxes, citizens essentially pay more attention to where the money's going, and vote accordingly. This makes good sense, doesn't it? If you buy something for a buck, you probably don't care if it's the highest quality. If you buy something for $10, you pay more attention to quality or maybe decide you don't need it after all. Read the full article to learn what one libertarian economist thinks conservatives ought to do with this counterintuitive knowledge. (Also via Political Animal.)

(Crossposted to Xferen.)