Santorum: Fiscal Conservative

Appearing in three Fourth of July parades in Iowa last week, Rick Santorum said, “What we need is an Independence Day candidate that believes in the independence of the American people, not its dependence on government and government programs.”

I think Rick Santorum may be that candidate.  Any number of the current contenders might make an excellent president, but as Santorum points out, he already has a record of doing the work that needed to be done, even when it was unpopular—even when it cost him his senate seat.  We could do with more principled politicians like him. 

Or, as a Washington Post reporter put it last December, “Santorum was a tea party kind of guy before there was a tea party.”  It’s an identity Santorum embraces.

His record includes fighting hard for—and almost achieving—a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution back in the 1990s.  In a television appearance yesterday, Santorum again made the case for such an amendment.  Santorum also made the case and discussed his record in a longer opinion piece that ran in Politico last month.  Among other things, he pointed out that “As we currently stand, the federal government’s annual spending is nearly one-fourth of GDP,” and advocated a “return . . . to the historical spending norm of 18% of GDP.”

In fact, last week Santorum released a five-part plan for shrinking government, expanding our liberty, and getting the economy healthy again.  The first part bears repeating:

We must reduce the size and scope of a government that is stifling job creation

Historically, the federal government has been 18% of America’s gross domestic product.  If we hope to not be served the fate of the western European countries now embattled with debt crisis after debt crisis, we must return to our historical norms.  This starts by first cutting government spending, capping future government spending, and finally enacting a Balanced Budget Amendment to our constitution.

Part two is to stop punishing job creation.  “Rick Santorum believes we need to reduce taxes on individuals across the board, making the system simpler, flatter, and fairer,” which already sounds great, but he goes further:

cut the corporate tax rate in half, . . . cut the tax rate to zero for all manufacturers irrespective of the tax paying entity[,] permanently extend the current Capital Gains and Dividend Tax rates, repeal the Death Tax, and repatriate taxable income outside the United States at a rate of 5% to induce job creation here in America rather than abroad.  And, we must not only encourage innovation, but celebrate it by no longer holding entrepreneurs hostage year-in and year-out through the tax code’s treatment of the research and development of new and promising discoveries — regardless of whether it is the next ground-breaking cancer treatment or a component for a fuel-efficient engine.

He’s willing to take the risk of publicly making specific proposals—much more specific and effective than our current president generally does.  Perhaps we should reward his courage and vision with the nomination?

The third part of Santorum’s plan is to cut some of the (ludicrously oversized) mess of federal regulations, and get the regulatory agencies themselves under control.  This is very important not only for liberty but also for the economy:  It appears that the federal regulatory burden costs the economy trillions of dollars annually; it and federal taxes combined may be sucking up more than a third of the total income in the whole country—and that’s not even counting state and local government.

Parts four and five are financial reform to make sure the 2008 collapse never happens again, and giving Americans more freedom to make use of America’s natural resources.  Santorum goes into detail on these last three just as he did on taxes; you can read all about this plan, “the Santorum vision”, on his Web site.

Does Santorum have a chance in this crowded primary field?  Santorum thinks so; he calls his campaign “the little engine that could”.  Meanwhile Tim Pawlenty suggests that “it’s a little early” to put much stock in polls; “these early polls are not a good indicator of anything. If they were, Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton would be president of the United States. They almost never predict the outcome.”  After all, the primary elections don’t start until next February.

In other news, both Santorum and fellow primary candidate Michele Bachmann have signed a candidate pledge recommended by a Christian organization called the Family Leader.  The pledge includes a long list of good pro-marriage, pro-life, and pro-liberty commitments, from promising (again) to be faithful to one’s wife or husband to “downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA’s $14.3 trillion public debt,” unfunded liabilities, etc.  You can read the full original document here.  Apparently some people tried to create a controversy (see article linked at the beginning of this paragraph) over an item in the preamble to the pledge, but I don’t think there was anything wrong with it; judge for yourself:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

As far as I can remember, it’s true that the American family really broke down over the course of the twentieth century, perhaps especially the black family.  It seems clear to me that the Family Leader wasn’t trying to suggest that there was anything good about slavery, as that news article implies (in fact, the first thing the Family Leader says is that “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families”).  Instead, the point is that the breakdown of the black family in modern America is so bad that “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby” born today.  That’s really bad.

In any case, the Family Leader had no reason to pick a fight about this.  They removed the misconstrued language from the preamble entirely, apparently only two days after the pledge was first released.  You can read the new version here.

Minor edit (July 11th, 2011): I corrected a typo above (replaced “current generally president does” with “current president generally does”).