McClintock: Fiscal Mess a Chance for Republicans to Lead

by CalWatchdog Staff | January 14, 2013 9:44 am

Jan. 14, 2013

By Katy Grimes

We’ve heard so much about the nation’s “fiscal cliff” that we can’t even see the real fiscal mess in front of our faces: the approaching bankruptcy of our nation. So warned Rep. Tom McClintock, R-California, when I met him for an interview. But he also had positive words on how Republicans can lead the nation back to prosperity.

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“The truth is that once the government has spent a dollar, it has already decided to tax it,” McClintock explained. “The only question is whether it taxes that dollar now or taxes it later by running a deficit.”

“By postponing spending cuts, Congress turned the ‘fiscal cliff’ bill’s tax relief provisions into a mere illusion,” he said. “The bill passed by Congress actually increases federal spending by more than $300 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office[2] — and more than $600 billion when you include the totality of new social and corporate welfare spending and tax exemptions to reward politically connected special interests.”

McClintock said that, since Congress postponed the spending reductions contained in the sequester and we continue to spend money we don’t have, the net result of this measure is simply to transfer the current tax bill to our children.

Business and politics

Seventy-six percent of all small business income is going to be hit by President Obama’s tax hikes, according to McClintock. “The income  they use to create and sustain two-thirds of the jobs in our economy is being taxed higher. This means hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs will evaporate over the next year.”

About 850,000 small businesses are going to pay higher taxes. But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to be concerned about this. Like most Democrats, they believe that, regardless of the tax rates, people will always go along about their business and comply, McClintock said.

California looks even worse. The state controller’s office reported, [3]“Corporate taxes came in $445.9 million below (-31.2 percent)” monthly estimates in the 2012-13 budget. “The State ended the last fiscal year with a cash deficit of $9.6 billion. As of December 31, that cash deficit totaled $24.2 billion and was covered with $14.2 billion of internal borrowing (temporary loans from special funds), and $10 billion of external borrowing.”

Add these bad numbers to the  the “fiscal cliff” deal, McClintock said, and the deficit is going to balloon in California, as well as the nation. “We’re going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending added to the budget at a time when we’re borrowing roughly 60 cents for every dollar that we spend. We’ve just taken an enormous tax burden, added to it, and handed it to our kids.”

McClintock lost two close elections, in 1994 and 2002, for California state controller. In his more than 20 years in the California Legislature, he was one of the legislators most knowledgeable on the state budget.

Voters and immigrants

Talking with McClintock is actually uplifting because he is an historian. While the numbers sound daunting at the moment, he understands real trends in history. One of these trends is with voters.

We talked about the wave of immigrants coming to the United States, and the impact on elections since the country was founded. McClintock said that, throughout American history, immigrants’ voting changed significantly as their socioeconomic status rose. “When was the last time you heard anyone talk about the Italian or Irish vote?” he asked. “It wasn’t that long ago, only about 30 years, that we were talking about the importance of the Italian and Irish votes.”

Italian and Irish immigrants started out voting predominantly for Democrats. But as they prospered in America, in increasing numbers they joined the Republican Party, as shown by such prominent names as President Ronald Reagan and Justice Antonin Scalia.

Right now, the Hispanic vote is receiving all of the attention. In the last two national elections, Hispanics voted heavily Democratic. But McClintock said that, just as it was with the Italian and Irish immigrants, as Hispanics prosper, they will vote more Republican. Which is another reason why restoring strong prosperity should be Republicans’ major goal.

Compromise is king in D.C.

One of the biggest issues with Republicans is whether or not their politicians hold firm on promises for limited government. McClintock said compromise is only appropriate when it benefits the country, yet compromise is used too often by Republicans. Rarely do Democrats compromise.

McClintock agreed that it’s usually Republicans on the losing side of compromise. “Is the country better off because of the vote?” McClintock asked of the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal.

Last week, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Morain criticized McClintock for voting against the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal, which passed anyway:

“But as he showed last week, his political machine of one has gained compatriots among the shrunken but more conservative band of Republicans representing California in the House. That doesn’t bode well for California as it tries to get back some of the money it sends to Washington, and certainly not for the Sierra district McClintock represents.”

I asked McClintock about this piece. “Here’s a question for the Sacramento Bee,” McClintock replied. “What does Morain plan to say to the newly unemployed?”

McClintock said the unemployment rate in California of nearly 10 percent is going to get worse. “Increasing numbers of unemployed persons in California will wreak havoc on the state’s economy, reducing revenues while the demand for state social services rises,” McClintock said. California still owes the federal government $10 billion[4] for unemployment relief.

“The country is getting a graduate course in Obamanomics in the next four years,” McClintock said. Despite this, he said America is waking up and paying attention.

Ronald Reagan lives

Although Republicans constantly are being criticized as the party of “no,” McClintock said that, when somebody is driving you off a cliff, “no” is a handy word to have in your vocabulary. But it can’t be the only word in the national debate over the future of the country.

McClintock said President Reagan built morale so people believed things could be accomplished. Right now there is low morale among Republicans. But this is just a blip in history, said McClintock. “We’ve had it worse,” he remembered of the 1976 election, when Democrat Jimmy Carter won with a Democratic Congress. They ran the country into a recession. Only four years later, Reagan swept in and restored prosperity with major tax cuts.

“When Carter was president, the mood in the country was dark. When Reagan became president, all of a sudden people started to believe things could be accomplished again,” McClintock said. In another dark hour, McClintock wants those beliefs to rise again.

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2013/01/14/mcclintock-fiscal-mess-a-chance-for-republicans-to-lead/

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