"Starve the Beast" made taxpayers poorer (and killed conservatism in the bargain)

Self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and blogger extraordinaire, Andrew Sullivan, has been praising Paul Ryan and the budget proposal he's hatched for the GOP - and he's been taking a lot of well-deserved flak for embracing an agenda that Paul Krugman has correctly identified as "ludicrous and cruel" (HERE in an excellent fact-based column.)

E.D. Kain, writing at Forbes quotes one of Sullivan's readers in response:

[Ryan’s budget] is the culmination of about a thirty year Republican strategy called "starve the beast," by which Republicans have worked to reduce taxes and increase the national deficit as large as possible -  all to create the supposed "deficit crisis" that we now face and to use that crisis to eliminate programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and a slew of other programs (EPA, SEC, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, etc.) that the Republican class has never been able to eliminate through the democratic process.  This "starve the beast" Republican strategy has been openly acknowledged for years and I know you are well aware of it.  And the Ryan "budget plan" is transparently an attempt to cash in on this long-standing political agenda.

Interestingly, also at Forbes, last year the conservative commentator Conor Friedersdorf clearly offered an analysis that should be obvious to anyone like Sullivan who touts "fiscal conservatism" as a guiding principle. In short, "Starve the Beast" proponents - the kind of reckless "conservatives" like Paul Ryan, who voted for the Bush tax cuts and wants  even bigger breaks for high earners - are themselves responsible for the growth in debt and the ensuing obligations on average taxpayers to sustain fiscal balance over the long run, a prospect which no sane person believes can be done without increases in progressive taxation. Fiedersdorf "headlined" his piece forthrightly - "How 'Starve the Beast' Made the Taxpayer Poorer."

Unlike most of today's self-described conservatives, Friedersdorf doesn't hesitate to identify the origins of this crazy notion that you can make government smaller and balance budgets simply by cutting taxes, using a couple of "oldie-but-goodie" quotes dating to Ronald Reagan's first presidential campaign:

    (Independent candidate) John Anderson: “I have been very careful in saying that what I’m going to do is to bring federal spending under control first.”

    Ronald Reagan: “John tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”

    – An exchange during the 1980 presidential debates

Thirty years separate us from that exchange. At the time, President Reagan’s “starve the beast” argument was plausible: if the American people, via their Congressional representatives, strongly objected to imprudent deficits, tax cuts might indeed result in decreased federal spending. But subsequent events prove he was wrong...

Jonathan Rauch explained the result this way in an old piece in The Atlantic: 

Suppose the federal budget is balanced at $1 trillion. Now suppose Congress reduces taxes by $200 billion without reducing spending. One result is a $200 billion deficit. Another result is that voters pay for only 80 percent of what government actually costs. Think of this as a 20 percent discount on government. As everyone knows, when you put something on sale, people buy more of it. Logically, then, tax cuts might increase the demand for government instead of reducing the supply of it.

He draws a conclusion that is an uncomfortable truth for any conservative who faces up to it. “The way to limit the growth of government is to force politicians, and therefore voters, to pay for all the government they use—not to give them a discount,” he writes. “By turning a limited-government movement into an anti-tax movement, conservatism has effectively gone into business with the Big Government that it claims to oppose. It is not starving the beast. It is fueling the beast’s appetite.”

Those words were written in 2006. But the right still hasn’t learned its lesson. On the eve of tax day earlier this year, for example, populist television personality Sarah Palin gave a speech asking Congress, “please, starve the beast, don’t perpetuate the problem, don’t fund the largess, we need to cut taxes.” In her desire for lower taxes, she’s got a friend in me, but the way to get there is reducing expenditures, unless you’re irresponsible, or else selfish and old enough that you won’t be around when the bill for the deficit comes due.

I would no doubt disagree with Fiedersdorf on the appropriate scope of the federal government, "ideal" tax rates or degrees of progressivity, and much else related to the economy - but I applaud him for his honesty about the perverse "Starve the Beast" ideology that Paul Ryan epitomizes. This is not conservatism by any reasoned definition. It's the culimination of a thirty-year dishonest hustle, a cruel joke on the taxpayer and an exercise in social nihilism disguised as "serious" budget proposals from the very folks who have busted every federal budget their hands could touch. 

Conservatism in this country - with a few exceptions such as Fiedersdorf who are not bound to the GOP's partisan circle - has been destroyed by the very pretenders to conservatism.  I don't identify politically with conservatism - although many of my liberal views are founded on a desire to preserve "traditional conservative" values of community, family, social stability and entrepreneurial opportunity.  But I take no pleasure in watching one "wing" of our political discourse having crashed and burned in an orgy of dishonesty and cynicism - ultimately in service of no one but the economic elite.  Our country is poorer for the destruction of decent, thoughtful conservatism by a reckless, ideological Right.

E.D. Kain link via Balloon Juice.