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It doesn’t seem to add up.
Before the 2012 election, voters told pollsters economic issues were their greatest concern. Gov. Mitt Romney obliged them with sober proposals for getting the economy back on track. President Barack Obama, however, just offered more of his wild spending and big deficits.
Nevertheless, according to exit polls, voters preferred Obama’s handling of the sick economy. Why didn’t Romney’s sensible policies carry him to the White House?
Here’s what I think: Voters were bored stiff by what the Republicans showed them in 2012. Worse than that, the GOP campaign missed the big picture of future economic upheaval.
The GOP flogs issues that are important to a few people, but not to large numbers of voters. Having called something a problem, they promise to solve it. This leads the campaign into a swamp, where costly solutions to non-problems take over, and special interests jump in to take advantage.
Let me give two examples: energy independence and aid to small business.
The promise to make the nation self-sufficient in energy use is a relic of the Nixon-Ford-Carter mindset, where price controls and subsidies made energy problems worse. The quest for independence inspires a morass of regulations and subsidies that no informed voter would care much about but from which a few people get rich.
It makes sense to have a reserve, but the oil market is huge and ever ready to supply oil to the United States by some indirect route, regardless of any boycott. With new discoveries and technologies in natural gas and shale oil, we seem to be moving naturally toward independence.
Then there’s that golden oldie “help small business.”
Back in 1982, I worked on a presidential task force on reducing small business regulation. I’ll bet our excellent report would still be relevant today, if anyone could find a copy of it. The reason so little gets done is that every regulation exists because someone benefits, and that beneficiary will fight like a wolverine to maintain that regulation.
What’s so special about small firms? They create lots of jobs, in the sense of hiring new workers. But they also fire a lot of people, and it just about evens out.
Some politicians recommend setting up agencies to help small firms. But usually the “help” turns out to be worthless advice from a GS-14 in some miasmic backwater of the federal bureaucracy.
Smallness is not a virtue that deserves assistance from taxpayers. As a political issue, it will hardly shake down the thunder from the sky. Small firms (and other-sized business too) should be free from excessive regulations, but as a gripping political issue: ho hum.
Let’s face it: The Republicans’ menu of economic policies is stale.
But their real problem was the neglect of the big issues that truly threaten our standard of living. Romney did well when he focused on the awful results of Obama’s policies, but not so well when he took it easy.
Many politicians worry about leaving the national debt to “our grandchildren.” It’s worse than that. The horrible fact is that the burden of the debt will come any time now, in some sort of financial crash, that will affect everyone who holds assets in dollars.
Since the only way to get rid of a debt so large is to monetize it (pay it off with printed money), the damage will be done long before our “grandchildren” are in the job market.
Would it not be fair to let voters in on this? Only Sen. Rand Paul seems to see the real and present dangers of our fiscal madness.
The budget mess is not the only issue, of course. If the GOP is going to have a chance, it needs to derive its policies from free market principles. Limited government is fundamental. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution should be interpreted, or better yet revised, so that it limits the federal government to those responsibilities expressly stated. So goodbye Department of Education, HUD, and half of Commerce, for a start.
But counting unfunded liabilities, we are $90 trillion in the hole, and that is the biggest issue for any political party that wants to survive.
Kenneth Brown is a retired senior executive with the National Science Foundation.
