Creative Conservatism
CONTINETTI, MATTHEW
EDITORIAL Creative Conservatism If you’re out of power, you might as well take advantage of it. Surely this moment calls for some creative conservatism. The economy has been in recession...
...A party with bold prescriptions—even competing bold prescriptions—for the future is bound to perform better than one without ideas...
...They can look for something more substantive than fanciful and nostalgic small-government talk, something more principled than going along with Obama...
...That agenda is clear...
...This sort of squabbling is less than useless...
...In September, more than a few were ready to risk the global banking system’s collapse in the hopes that they could ride anti-Wall Street populism to victory...
...An awful lot of Detroit’s problems were actually made in Washington...
...You need to take a healthy dose of anti-anxiety medication before watching the volatile equities markets...
...These days, plenty of Republicans and conservatives are ready to turn their backs on the big three automakers, and risk a spike in unemployment and who knows what other spillover effects, because the government has to draw the line somewhere...
...To purge the complicated and debilitating mortgage securities from the banking system, conservatives might back a federal mortgage refi nancing proposal along the lines of what Lawrence B. Lindsey outlined in these pages (“Building a Better Bailout,” December 1, 2008...
...It’s inwardlooking, woolly-headed, and only furthers the perception that the GOP is out of touch...
...Conservatives may not have any defi nite answers to what ails the economy and how to fi x it, but liberals do: an enormous Keynesian stimulus—somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion over two years...
...Lower payroll taxes, for instance, would make it cheaper to hire workers and put more money in the pockets of those already working...
...It probably isn’t...
...Let a thousand conservative fl owers bloom...
...Republicans are without a clear agenda...
...The good news is that conservatives now have a lot of time on their hands...
...The GOP is shell-shocked from last month’s election results...
...The Bush administration has been zig-zagging from one policy fi x to another with no sign of success...
...They can think about the future...
...and relishing the prospect of bankruptcy for GM, Chrysler, and Ford...
...And there are some regulations—like increasing capital requirements for fi nancial institutions—that might actually shore up confi - dence in the fi nancial sector...
...On the auto bailout, it might help if Republicans abandoned their knee-jerk, anti-Detroit mentality...
...People say that Republicans don’t have any ideas, but that isn’t entirely true...
...The gains the party made in the years since the 1994 Republican revolution have been erased...
...Why not call loudly for the repeal of onerous CAFE regulations (which force Detroit to lose money making small cars no one wants to buy), perhaps in exchange for a gradual increase in the gas tax...
...And a politician who adopts a program of principled reform—one that responds to the problems of late 2008 and beyond—could just wind up a Republican leader in the process...
...The right kind of tax cuts would help...
...Matthew Continetti, for the Editors...
...This doesn’t mean it’s the right policy to support the bailout the automakers want...
...A place to start would be to distinguish between interventions in the economy that might lead us out of this mess and those that will prolong the suffering...
...Consumer spending is falling to places where it hasn’t been in decades...
...The fi nancial, housing, and automobile sectors are in disarray...
...They have plenty of ideas—but too many of them are about which part of their coalition is to blame for their current misfortunes...
...The economy has been in recession since December 2007...
...They can enjoy the luxury of opposition and explore policy alternatives...
...Unfortunately, when Republicans have tried to be in touch, they’ve been tempted to be irresponsible...
...At the same time, it will be necessary to energetically oppose those measures that would seriously damage the chances of recovery, such as the rapid unionization that would follow “card-check” legislation, a return to protectionism and high tariffs, and the tax hikes scheduled for 2011...
...The hit to consumers at the pump could be compensated for by the payroll tax cut mentioned above...
...How exactly would any of this help the average working—or unemployed—family...
...Meanwhile, liberal Democrats, relatively unimpeded, will move on with their agenda...
...November saw the largest one-month drop in employment since 1974...
...corporate tax cuts (are there any profi ts to tax...
...And not just because of the human costs of a bankrupt American auto industry...
...They can pick their battles...
...But sometimes it seems as if the sum total of the current GOP economic agenda consists of calling for capital gains tax cuts (who has gains...
...EDITORIAL Creative Conservatism If you’re out of power, you might as well take advantage of it...
...And there are other serious proposals worth considering...
...The wilderness beckons...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 13
