Conservative Populism
PONNURU, RAMESH & levin, yuval
Conservative Populism Rightly understood. BY YUVAL LEVIN & RAMESH PONNURU Anxious lower middle class families are shaping up to be the crucial political constituency of this year’s election....
...Most parents will prefer money in their pockets to the liberal answer of subsidies for day care and housing...
...Uncontrolled immigration has also exerted downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the labor market...
...Republican candidates actually already have a set of policy proposals to address these concerns, but they have yet to campaign on their relevance to lower middle class families...
...These policies would not achieve the Democrats’ goal of “universal coverage...
...Equally worrying to the lower middle class voter is the high cost of raising a family...
...The silence on the right about their problems could lead these voters to conclude that protectionism, redistribution, and nationalized health care are the answers...
...Polls show that financial security is their biggest concern...
...More important, these voters are the heart and soul of the kind of American culture that Republicans want to promote: industrious and striving, family-oriented, culturally conservative, religious, and patriotic...
...But there are freemarket, conservative solutions, and the Republican candidates can highlight them...
...Republicans should be careful not to seem more intent on cutting corporate taxes than on listening to these voters...
...Lower middle class parents have been a crucial Republican constituency in recent years...
...Their wages have stagnated—almost entirely because of rising health care costs...
...The frontrunners have all proposed ending the tax penalty on individuals who buy their own insurance (rather than get it through work...
...The Democratic candidates have noticed and are championing an old-fashioned economic populism that stokes voters’ fears and seeks to direct them toward welfare statestyle solutions that expand the role of government...
...Yet Republicans continue to talk about health care as though getting more people insured were the only policy goal, or, worse, as though voters were deeply concerned with abstractions like improving market effi ciencies...
...Voters care more about these goals than about universality...
...But these voters’ concerns made them sour on the economy even at the height of the boom...
...They wouldn’t force everyone to buy insurance...
...Higher growth will not by itself address their concerns...
...With talk of recession in the air, many Republicans will be tempted to make pro-growth tax policies, and particularly cuts to the corporate income tax, the entirety of their economic message...
...The Republican frontrunners can speak to the concerns of lower middle class voters with such a three-pronged platform, which reduces their health care stress, eases their tax burden, and enforces immigration laws...
...That simple change would make it much easier for people who work for small businesses, or are out of work, to afford coverage—coverage that would stay with them from job to job...
...They also appear to be behind a great deal of the generally uneasy mood of the electorate...
...The candidates have also proposed a series of measures to increase competition in the health care industry, which would help control rising costs without a government takeover...
...But they would seriously reduce the number of people without insurance, make insurance more affordable for those who want it, and make it more portable and secure...
...Their insecurity has markedly reduced public support for free trade and contributed to public concerns about immigration...
...Among Republicans, only Mike Huckabee has made a real effort to speak to the lower middle class...
...But a substantial reduction in future illegal immigration is almost everyone’s goal, and would offer economic benefi ts to working families that Republicans can tout...
...By raising a child, they are already making a large contribution to Social Security...
...These voters could be persuaded to support a governmentrun health care system—as the Democrats are trying to do—but surveys suggest that they would prefer a solution that does not risk taking power away from them and their doctors, or compromising their quality of care...
...They worry about losing their insurance if they lose their jobs, or getting stuck in jobs they do not want because they cannot carry their insurance with them to new ones...
...But this conservative populism is often merely a rhetorical echo of its liberal counterpart...
...It’s a platform that would be good for American families and good for Republican prospects...
...The debates surrounding how to handle illegal immigrants already here, and how to organize our system of legal immigration and improve assimilation, will and should continue...
...Health care is a particular concern for lower middle class workers...
...The other Republican candidates are not even trying to appeal to these voters, which could prove very costly in key states, especially in the upper Midwest, in November...
...An expanded child tax credit applied against the payroll tax would offer relief to exactly the families who need it...
...It would also rebuff the new populists on both the left and right who are heightening anxieties, not easing them, and are ignoring the real limits to what the government can do...
...Growth is indispensable...
...Republicans, who all agree on the need to stop illegal immigration, should make it clear that they will reduce that pressure by sharply cutting the infl ow of lower skilled workers across the border...
...His distinctive proposal, a form of national sales tax, would hurt many working families...
...On the stump, his economic message is always directed at the working family: “We’re losing manufacturing jobs, homeowners face a credit crisis, high fuel costs are spiraling, and families are hurting,” he noted in a recent campaign ad...
...Lower-income families are especially burdened by payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare...
...Without their support, after all, it will be hard to sustain a pro-growth politics...
...They worry about health and education costs, about retirement, and about their prospects for getting ahead...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 19
