Are the Republicans really going to let President Obama steal the economic- growth issue from them?
Sure, Obama’s bizarre agenda in his first two years gave the country a huge failed stimulus, months of fruitless debate over a government takeover of the health-care system and the illusion of “green jobs” — leaving us with unemployment remaining staggeringly high and millions of American simply giving up looking for work.
But don’t look for answers — coherent ones, anyway — from the Republican Party, which, for all its newfound power, appears content debating equally fruitless ideas, like ending the Federal Reserve, and more recently toying with a government shutdown to squeeze some more budget cuts out of Obama and the still-Democratic Senate.
If the Republicans have a real pro-growth agenda, I can’t find anyone who can clearly articulate it. Sure, bills and resolutions floating around Congress would cut taxes and regulations — but there’s nothing that comes close to a realistic or inspiring formula to get our weak economy growing the way it should.
The GOP — where Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan once saw a limitless future based on a free-market plan for growth — has become the party of green eyeshades, government shutdowns and dour predictions about our future, while the American people continue to suffer.
Fine: The country does need to put a stop to the mindless spending that is the heart of Obamanomics. But Republicans aren’t filling in the missing part of the puzzle — how putting people to work and having them pay taxes leads to smaller deficits without cutting a single program.
Which leaves a huge opening for Obama. In recent weeks, the left-leaning and bailed-out Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs offered what the mainstream media considered a credible take on how GOP efforts to block the president’s spending initiatives will slow our feeble economic recovery and modest reductions in unemployment.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have become GOP icons for their courage in taking on public-sector unions — but the broader appeal of their message of cutting budgets before cutting taxes is still questionable. Polls show, for example, that a majority of the public still supports collective-bargaining rights for public-sector unions — even though taxpayers have been routinely screwed as politicians buy union support with outrageous pay and benefits.
“Eventually, the Republican leadership will put together something that resembles a growth plan,” said one GOP Hill staffer. “The question is, will the president have already seized the agenda by talking about hope, while we sit around with our green eyeshades on?”
I ran all this by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who conceded that budget cuts have taken up much party resources. But, he said, it’s “just the first step” in restoring economic order after two years of unfettered Democratic control. He then rattled off a laundry list of growth initiatives that House Republicans have undertaken, from introducing bills on tax reform and trade to rethinking parts of last year’s financial-reform law that inhibit bank lending to small businesses.
The left-leaning media, Cantor claims, are ignoring the GOP’s growth plan. He has a point: Most reporters and editors have never bought the economic benefits of tax cutting and less regulation; they’re suckers for the supposed benefits of government spending. Hence the largely uncritical coverage of Obama’s lame “stimulus,” which was supposed to have given us 8.5 percent unemployment by now.
But do Republicans really have a solid plan to grow the economy? Here’s Cantor’s rationale for tackling spending first: “We’re trying to create an environment that fosters innovation and where capital flows to its most efficient use,” he told me, adding that “fiscal discipline” is a necessary part of that formula.
Problem is, it’s hard to sell somebody on the efficiency of “capital flows” when he’s out of work, or knows people who are — and Obama is still pushing his often-effective “hope and change” on a worried American labor force.
It’s mystifying that Congress members and other Republicans who evoke the name of Ronald Reagan just about every time they speak are so obsessed with cutting instead of growing the economy.
Keep in mind, Reagan hugely raised defense spending during the 1980s to defeat Soviet communism, but with a pro-growth plan of tax cuts and less regulation, the deficit as a percentage of our economic output actually declined once his policies began kicking in, falling to levels far lower than they are today.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent and the author of “Bought and Paid For.”