Unhappy Ex-Conservatives

Former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman laments the Republican embrace of tax cuts over fiscal sanity:

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts. . . . in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.

The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.

Andrew Sullivan adds:

the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.