The Fiscal Choice the GOP Needs to Make
Can the GOP be both the party of the middle class and the party of small government? That is the central question facing Republican lawmakers in the Biden era, and a great deal hinges on how they decide to answer it.
Restraining the growth of government has for decades been a unifying cause for the GOP. Though elected Republicans have only rarely succeeded in halting the advance of welfare liberalism, they have at times managed to slow it down. But as Speaker Kevin McCarthy is learning the hard way, even that has become an arduous task.
Since the Obama presidency, Republicans in Congress have been trying—and mostly failing—to reconcile two conflicting imperatives. Recognizing that the party’s core constituency now consists of older, non-college-educated voters with a concrete interest in protecting Medicare and Social Security benefits, they’ve largely abandoned the pursuit of cost-saving entitlement reforms. At the same time, the GOP electorate remains opposed to the broad-based tax increases that would almost certainly be needed to finance Medicare and Social Security expenditures if the programs remain untouched.
[Reihan Salam: Searching for a conservatism of normalcy]
One way to address this
