Tom Dash-Left
No growth.

By Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth
February 14, 2002 8:30 a.m.

his week Sen. Joseph Loserman (er Lieberman) lashed out at my organization the Club for Growth for running what he described as "gutter ads" against Tom Daschle. He was referring to TV ads the Club has been running in South Dakota for the past month which rather innocently point out that Mr. Daschle is the one man in Washington who is single-handedly blockading passage of an economic stimulus plan.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to running "gutter ads," but our Daschle ads have the virtue of being absolutely factually correct. After four months of imprisoning the emergency-jobs/tax-cut bill in the Senate chamber, Daschle finally and officially decapitated the legislation last week. The Club for Growth ad makes the charge that Daschle has put "petty politics ahead of jobs and economic security," and we challenge any reasonable minded person to refute that claim.

All of this means that thanks to Senator Daschle's dash to the left, there won't be a pro-growth tax cut this year — despite the fact that 1 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past 12 months. If the economy is going to recover from recession, it will have to do so without any help from Congress.

From the start of the economic-stimulus debate right after the September 11th attacks, Daschle has refused to be coaxed from a hard-left stance on the economy. He said no to a capital-gains tax cut. No to income-tax-rate cuts. No, to the elimination of the unfair death tax. No to accelerating implementation of President Bush's tax cut passed last May. He blew up a compromise stimulus plan right before Christmas because that plan would have given health insurance to unemployed workers through a system giving workers health-care choices, rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all government command-and-control plan. Throughout this whole ugly process, Daschle has been dogmatically left wing and President Bush was wise not to negotiate with someone who refused to negotiate.

Fortunately, South Dakotans are paying attention to Daschle's obstructionist behavior. Recent polls show that Daschle's support back home is eroding. A recent poll by the ABC News affiliate in Sioux Falls found that 59% of South Dakotans disapprove of the job Mr. Daschle is doing. That's lousy news for a man who harbors hopes of winning the Democratic nomination for president in 2002. The Dems aren't likely to nominate another Al Gore: i.e., a candidate who can't even carry his own state. (Though there is still lively debate about whether Al Gore was ever a Tennessean.)

We would like to think we've had something to do with that bubbling voter discontent in South Dakota, but mostly Daschle has only himself to blame. The past few months have brought one political miscue after another. Here's just one example: Daschle continues to rail against death-tax elimination "for the super wealthy." But just a little over a year ago 80% of South Dakota voters approved a ballot initiative to eliminate the state inheritance tax — for everyone. This is a small state. Daschle is damned near the only South Dakotan who does support retention of the death tax.

For months now Daschle has been protesting against tax cuts "for the rich," which he lambastes as fiscally irresponsible and bad for the economy. But Daschle gets an F in economics. In the 1960s and 1980s income-tax-rate cuts for all Americans caused dramatic and lost-lasting economic recoveries in America. John F. Kennedy sagely observed in 1963 that "an economy hampered with excessive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget and it will never produce enough jobs." JFK believed that a rising tide would lift all boats. So did Reagan. In the 1980s, Reagan's 30 percent tax cut in the midst of the mini-depression he inherited from Jimmy Carter led to the creation of 17 million jobs over the next decade, helped conquer inflation, and doubled federal tax revenues.

Daschle says he's worried about the budget deficit exploding. But to deal with federal red ink he'd rather put American families on a Slimfast diet than the federal government. Last year Congress allowed federal spending to soar by 11% — even though president Bush asked for just a 4% hike in outlays. Obviously, the war on terrorism will require new security spending both here and abroad. But certainly domestic social spending could be curtailed. If overall federal outlays were held to the rate of population growth and inflation (a budget limitation formula many states must live by), the federal debt over the next decade would be some $500 billion lower. Would that really be so hard to do, Tom?

By torpedoing the stimulus bill, Daschle has left all national Democrats nakedly vulnerable to the charge that they refused to help rescue the economy when they had the chance. They refused to even temporarily call a time-out on their class-warfare crusade in order to get Americans back to work. Republicans can now very conveniently and plausibly make the case that if the nation enjoys an economic acceleration and a stock market surge anytime soon, it will be the Bush recovery. If the U.S. remains stuck in a rut of anemic or even negative GDP growth with a continuing decline in equity values, Americans will call it the "Daschle recession."

And in large part, they will be right.