fiscal policy

 In his weekly address, President Obama announced today that he has "begun scouring our budget line by line for programs that don't work so we can make room for those that do... it means reinstating the pay-as-you-go rule that we followed during the 1990s - so if we want to spend, we'll need to find somewhere else to cut."  He went on to add "Finally, in the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective.  In this effort, there will be no sacred cows, and no pet projects.  All across America, families are making hard choices, and it's time their government did the same."

For a kid who grew up loving Kevin Kline's title character in Dave making room for a homeless shelter by cutting payments to non-performing contractors and an ad program to make people feel better about cars "they've already bought," this is music to my ears, and I would really love to see the Obama administration follow through on this. 

Any recommendations on where those cuts should be made?

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: We need to win the battles over definitions, principles and policy when it comes to fiscal matters.

President Barack Obama has signed the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, and has broken yet another promise that he made during the campaign. Apparently, there was some debate in the Oval Office over what to do with the bill:

"White House aides said they debated whether the president should sign an omnibus spending bill that includes more than 8,500 pet projects worth $7.7 billion.

"White House counselor David Axelrod suggested a veto would send a strong signal that Mr. Obama's Washington really would represent change. But the president decided it wasn't worth adding a fight with his own party onto a plate that is already overly filled."

We can also surmise that Obama was too embarrassed to sign the bill in public. Check out these tweets from ABC News' Jake Tapper:

jaketapper: "Why are you not signing this bill in public?" the president was asked after he talked about earmark reforms he'd like to see. no answer.

jaketapper: president obama signed the omnibus spending bill...no photographs allowed.

I didn't think too much more about it until Patrick Ruffini, @thingsbreak and I had this short Twitter conversation:

PatrickRuffini: GOP should call for a total ban on earmarks in light of the economy and the deficit. Every day we don't do so we seal our irrelevance #tcot

alaskan: @PatrickRuffini Problem is that there's wasteful spending that aren't earmarks. Need to find a way to describe appropriate public goods.

thingsbreak: @PatrickRuffini But renouncing rather than reforming is political suicide. Earmarks are not intrinsically evil but abused. Agree/disagree?

PatrickRuffini: @alaskan @thingsbreak Earmarks are the most visible and easiest to fix symbol of how Republicans have lost their way

I agree with Patrick that earmarks are the most visible symbol. But that's exactly the problem. I don't agree that it's enough for Republicans to fix "symbols" of how we've lost our way. I don't agree that we need to focus on symbols. Yes, we need to fix the abuse of the earmark process by reforming it. But the fact is that not all earmarks can be construed as wasteful spending and not all wasteful spending are in earmarks.

At the Heritage Foundation's Conservative Bloggers Briefing, I mentioned this to Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, and asked him how we can move away from discussing earmarks and move towards discussing wasteful spending. Price went on to talk about the growing deficit and debt, and said that we have to communicate these large numbers to the American people. I don't think this is quite enough.

It's easy to come up with rhetoric denouncing "the evils of earmarks," but what we should be focusing on substantively is wasteful spending. Republicans should take three concrete steps to revive conservatism in sound fiscal policy: (1) defining public goods and wasteful spending, (2) reformulate principles that voters can connect with, and (3) promoting new fiscal processes and policies that can achieve less spending, more transparency and better prioritization.

(For details on these steps, read below the fold.)

"The key to Republican credibility - on transparency and many other issues - is actual, unilateral leadership," wrote Jon Henke a couple of weeks ago.  He's correct, but I'll add that a major component of leadership is walking the walk before talking the talk.

Right now, millions of Americans are hopping mad about Obama's stimulus packages and for the first time in years the right is "Going Galt," as Michelle Malkin calls it.

Talk radio hosts are suddenly spending their time using libertarian and fiscally conservative rhetoric, but for the last eight years they've only provided token resistance (at best) to bloated Republican budgets. As late as today, I heard a local Republican talk show host defending Bush's spending record to a totally disbelieving caller.

Senator McCain talks a great talk about earmarks, but he (along with Governor Palin) also recently called the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae "necessary."  At the other side of this spectrum, Senator Shelby has spoken out against the stimulus package, but just took second place in the U.S. Senate pork contest. 

Regarding Alabama's other Republican Senator, Jeff Wartman writes: 

With the fifth column support of three Republicans, the U.S. Senate just passed President Obama's eight hundred billion dollar liberal spending package.  Next step, House and Senate negotiators will attempt to reconcile the bills (and quite possibly add more to the price tag in the process).

This spending plan is little more than a major redistribution bill financed by the national credit card.  As a coblogger at another site where I write wrote:

Obama, Pelosi, and the other Democrats selling this plan are focusing only on the gains certain parties will see.  No one is talking about where the wealth to fund this package will come from.  Notice I said wealth, not money.  While it is easy for the government to conjure money out of thin air, it cannot do so with wealth. 

So, where will the wealth for this come from?  It will come from you, me, and anyone else who holds US dollars.  All our wealth stored in dollars will be diminished via the inflation tax.  Those who have saved, invested, and otherwise sought to provide for themselves in the future will be punished.  These are the people who have provided economic stability and prosperity for the nation for two centuries.

In addition, the productive workers of the future will also be punished, as they will be the ones paying back the interest on the wealth redistributed.  The current generation of people under 35 will spend their entire working lives paying the price for the excesses of the Obama stimulus plan.

This plan is a declaration of war on those who produce wealth and live responsibly, now and into the future.  Who must suffer so others may profit?  We do.

Matt Drudge seems to agree with the distinction between wealth and money, as he posted Monopoly money on the top of his website yesterday.

It's quite fitting that the cover story for Newsweek makes this bold declaration: "We Are All Socialists Now."

There may be times, on relatively minor issues, where some level of compromise is a reasonable political and legislative solution.  Where that line should have been drawn in the past is no longer relevant; it's time for Americans to take as strong a stand against domestic socialism as we took again the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction," said Ronald Reagan in 1961. "We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."

The eventual direction the right will choose is still up in the air.  Will they continue to compromise core values for the sake of winning the next election or will they band together to fight the much tougher battle so we don't have to explain to our children what freedom means?