Governor Sarah Palin just hit a home run with her
cogent
op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
endorsing Congressman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s
Future, a tax-cutting, budget-balancing, entitlement-reforming
proposal which House Republicans still
refrain from embracing wholeheartedly.
In putting her political capital behind the Ryan plan, she
may be giving a needed spine transplant to the Republican Party and
saving it in spite of itself.
Governor Palin nicely highlights the relative merits of
the Ryan plan over the recent recommendations of the president’s
Nation Commission on Fiscal Responsibility which, while certainly
calling for some necessary and painful cost-cutting proposals,
“makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current
trend set by the Obama administration.”
Lest we forget, the National Commission is also
proposing an additional trillion dollars of
new taxes, something that is antithetical to everything the voters
told us in the recent election and anathema to most
Republicans.
So, if Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, they
presumably want to cut discretionary spending and, even more
importantly, reform runaway entitlement spending which is about
ready to deluge the nation in red ink with the aging and retirement
of the Baby Boomer generation now underway. Why then are the House
and Senate Republicans seemingly without any comprehensive,
programmatic alternatives to the presidential Commission’s
recommendations? After all, it takes a horse to beat a
horse.
What is the GOP’s Big Idea? I am all for cutting earmarks,
but they are drops in the big bucket of federal spending. I am all
for reducing marginal and corporate tax rates; but this game of
chicken in which Republicans join Democrats in spending on new
entitlements, two wars, increased discretionary spending, and
bailouts, well, for everyone, is going to turn out badly for
limited government and taxpayers absent a major overhaul of the way
the federal government does business. Something, as they say, has
gotta give, as the Greeks and Irish are finding out.
Which brings us back to Paul Ryan’s Roadmap.
No sitting Republican in the House or Senate, no GOP governor, and
no policy wonk in any conservative think tank has produced anything
as comprehensive as Ryan’s magnum opus which deals with
health care, taxes, entitlements, and economic growth all in one
audacious proposal.
This last point, i.e., the need to energize economic
growth, not simply stop the economic bleeding and outrageous
spending, was not lost on the former Alaskan governor. Ryan’s
proposal “does more than just fend off disaster,” says Palin. “CBO
[Congressional Budget Office] calculations show that the Roadmap
would also help create a ‘much more favorable macroeconomic
outlook’ for the next half-century.”
“The CBO estimates that under the Roadmap, by 2058
per-person GDP would be around 70% higher than the current trend,”
says Governor Palin. This is so because the plan replaces the
U.S.’s high and anticompetitive corporate income tax, maybe the
highest in the developed world, with a business consumption tax of
just 8.5%.
“The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP
(compared to 21% under the deficit commission’s proposals),” notes
Palin.
Notwithstanding the Roadmap’s comprehensive approach to
cutting the Gordian Knot of high spending, spiraling health care,
entitlement costs and an inefficient tax structure, only a dozen or
so Republicans have signed up to co-sponsor Ryan’s legislative
package. The party of Lincoln has gone AWOL on the only credible
proposal for fiscal reform consistent with Republican
principles.
The GOP’s no-show on the Ryan plan would be understandable
if there were several other viable alternatives floating around out
there in the political ether. There are none.
At some point, the Republican congressional leadership is
going to have to… well… lead. In this case, leadership begins by
educating the American people to the dimensions of the crisis they
face, something Governor Palin actually gives the President’s
commission credit for doing; but it cannot stop there. It is well
past time for them to embrace a concrete proposal that takes on the
tough issues, head-on, and prepare the electorate for the momentous
issues that must be faced now and in 2012.
The only game in town is Paul Ryan’s Roadmap around which
Governor Palin is rallying the troops, be they independents, Tea
Partiers or GOP mainstreamers. This may be her greatest
contribution to the Republican Party and the nation in its time of
need.
