Gov. Mitt Romney is forcing us to consider seriously how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got carried away by liberal impulses and got us into troubles.
I think Romney was not a fan of Ronald Reagan in the 1990s because he realized Reagan's program was fiscally irresponsible, cutting taxes while increasing military spending to defeat Soviet Communism. The result was the largest increase in the US public debt since WWII. As a business man who can read a spread sheet, Mitt Romney can recognize fiscal insanity when he sees it.
Now a leaked video of a private fundraiser Romney addressed in Florida in May is being attacked by the left in recent hours. It shows Mitt Romney not too happy with the liberal consensus which uses the tax code as a form of welfare, primarily through the mechanism of tax credits combined with statutory tax rates which nullify income tax liability. This was not a bug in the law. It was a feature intended all along. Romney is signaling that he's not entirely on board with this form of liberalism.
The idea of getting people off welfare was an ingenious one under Reagan, effectively rebating their Social Security contributions when they went to work, instead of collecting a check directly from the federal government while unemployed. But it was fundamentally a compromise with liberalism, and the Earned Income Tax Credit later took on a life of its own, being notably expanded under Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush. Combined with the Child Tax Credit, the two credits represent transfer payments far in excess of the cost of the mortgage interest deduction, the drumbeat against which gets louder by the day. To take away the mortgage interest deduction would yield the government about $80 billion a year in new revenue. But eliminating the two tax credits would end a direct federal government expenditure in excess of $110 billion a year.
If you want to know in what world liberals like Nancy Pelosi under a liberal president like Barack Obama would find it thinkable to consent to a deliberate underfunding of Social Security, liberalism's signature program, by rolling back payroll taxes to help the working poor during the Great Recession, look to Ronald Reagan, who did basically the same thing for poor people through the EITC way back in the 1980s. In making Social Security contributions rebateable to the working poor, Reagan was nothing if not a liberal trendsetter.
Another innovation and accommodation with liberalism by Ronald Reagan was EMTALA, part of the tax reform of 1986, which made it the law that emergency rooms had to provide services regardless of ability to pay. That unfunded mandate costs approximately only $50 billion a year today. I say "only" because lying about the severity of that problem became the heart of the healthcare debate which gave us ObamaCare. The Heritage Foundation may have authored the idea of the individual healthcare mandate in 1989, but once again it was Ronald Reagan who paved the way and provided the cover for accommodating what eventually became ObamaCare's liberal tyranny.
Romney's remarks also question George Bush's two-state solution to peace in Israel, which is nothing but another unrealistic aspiration of liberalism which thinks you can put a chicken and a hungry snake in the same pen and enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon. To this Romney wisely prefers the unsteady truce of the status quo. In doing so his realism is shining through.
Mitt Romney's looking better all the time, and conservatives should reconsider whether voting for him is such a bad idea after all.
