If Only The Democrats Would Start Supporting Social Security and Reproductive Rights, I Might Vote For Them

Shorter Glenn Reynolds: If only the Democrats would abandon the confiscatory tax rates and stagnant economic growth of the Clinton years and embrace the booming growth and lush surpluses of the fiscally sensible Bush years, I wouldn’t really consider voting for them anyway but I’m sure some random emailer might.

This–for lack of a better word–analysis gets a thumbs-up from our good friends at Donklephant, who claim that if the Democrats get fiscally responsible they may have a shot in 2008. I don’t even know what to say about that. The Instawankery he quotes says the emailer votes GOP “because of their stance on money and taxes, but that he agrees with the Democrats on a lot of other issues.” Unless he’s just talking about cultural issues, this would seem to mean that this voter supports middle-class entitlements but not raising taxes in order to pay for them. In other words, it seems that his support for Republicans is perfectly rational. If, on the other hand, you think that the state should actually raise sufficient revenue to fund what most people want it to do, you should vote Democratic. But there’s nothing the Democrats need to “get”; you may recall a presidential candidate who argued that the enormously successful fiscal policies of the Democratic administration–under which, although Glenn Reynolds missed it, many people even got rich–should be continued and the revenues for the largest entitlement be put in the “lockbox,” while his opponent proposed a program of spending and massive upper-class tax cuts that didn’t add up even given the most optimistic assumptions. But that lockbox guy was such a grind! That give away the surplus feller, you could have a beer with, even if you were rich. And like the Instawife says, the only good measure of fiscal policy is whether it immediately saves affluent people money, and since Milton Friedman says that tax cuts don’t decrease revenues that must be what’s happened the last 5 years.