Thirty years ago this week, in the midst of the Cold War, TIME Magazine did a cover story with a special report on socialism – describing it as an “an ideology that promises more than it delivers.”
The story itself said that “against the backdrop of seemingly incurable inflation, unemployment, industrial stagnation and volatile currencies, a clarion for an economic restructuring sounds attractive.”
That year, a Democrat Congress and a Democrat president were busy taking our economy down the path of high-dollar, high-tax liberalism, a direction that led straight to stagflation.
This week, their successors in the House of Representatives, also operating in a challenging economic climate, will put forward a budget for the coming year borrowed from that 30-year-old playbook.
The Democrats‘ fiscally irresponsible budget provides for a massive spending spree by the federal government bankrolled by the single largest tax increase in American history.
This tax hatchet – clocking in at a whopping $683 billion – leaves no filer behind. All told, 116 million Americans will get squeezed by the Democrat tax hike – among them the poor, married couples, families with children, families without children – to the tune of, on average, $1,833.
Under the Democrat budget plan, the child tax credit would be cut in half, the marriage penalty would go up, and the death tax would be resurrected. Across the board, taxpayers would be shifted into higher brackets.
Telling the American people that that’s not a tax hike is like trying to sneak sunrise past a rooster. It’s just not going to happen.
The Democrats’ fiscally irresponsible budget also fails to address the pivotal generational issue we currently face – how to sustain the solvency of our entitlement programs and keep the promises we have made to baby boomers and newborns alike.
This problem is quite real: if the government does not act to rein in runaway entitlement spending, then keeping the promises we have made will require us to either raise taxes every year until they are roughly 60 percent higher than they are today or to shut down every government entity except Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
A quick search of the websites of the top three Democrat leaders in the House for the phrase “entitlement reform” yields one result – a House Republican bill proposing an entitlement reform commission.
This is about much more than how numbers add up on a Excelspreadsheet or a search engine – it’s about how fundamentally different the two parties’ views are when it comes to the people’s money.
For Democrats, the first decision is always how to spend the people’s money; for Republicans, saving it tops the to-do list.
Instead of practicing what they preach, Democrats promise more than they can pay for, and end up sticking the taxpayer with the bill. That’s no way to govern. And it turns the principle of fiscal responsibility on its head.
In the end, the Democrats’ tax-and-spend budget will surely exacerbate the crunch American families are feeling from a slowing economy and rising costs of living, particularly gas prices. We know where this leads because America has been to this crossroad before.
The task of putting Carter-era stagflation behind us fell to a Republican president who, thankfully for America, shared with his country a distaste for big government and higher taxes.
Ronald Reagan said once that the “Founding Fathers considered the power of the purse the most important responsibility of the legislative branch. If that power is abused, it can have very serious consequences for our nation, not only threatening our prosperity with huge budget deficits but, ultimately, undermining the economic foundations of our safety and national security.”
Words worth considering when looking at the budget blueprint House Democrats will present to the country this week.
Oh. And who was on last week’s cover of TIME? Hillary Clinton.
Rep. Adam Putnam is chairman of the House Republican Conference.
