First Principles

I only got home last night in time to see the second half of the Presidential debate.  I didn’t hear anything unexpected, although overall I thought it was substantive and good.  Will it matter?  Who can say.  But here are my thoughts.

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The most compelling thing to me was in the part I missed, but I heard the exchange on the radio this morning.  Mitt Romney hit Rick Santorum for increasing the debt, and Rick Santorum responded that he never voted to raise taxes.

But Rick Santorum was wrong.  By voting to extend the debt ceiling without any compensatory spending cuts, he DID vote to raise taxes.  By TRILLIONS of dollars.  That debt is going to be paid by someone down the road, which is going to require the forcible acquisition of private wealth from the government.  And just to make it worse, that wealth is going to be taken from people who weren’t old enough (or born enough) to have consented to the over-spending in the first place.

If that’s not a tax, nothing is.

(This, by the way, is why the “starve the beast” philosophy of Grover Norquist’s tax pledge is so misguided.  A pledge to limit revenue without pledging to limit spending doesn’t starve anything – it just encourages the beast to whip out a few billion credit cards, or on the state level, to hide debt, steal from local governments, and play other fiscal shell games.  Santorum’s obvious – and oblivious – pride in claiming he didn’t raise taxes illustrates this disconnect perfectly, and helps explain why supposedly conservative Republicans ran up the record debts that are now helping put our economy in so much jeopardy.)

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The seeming alliance between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney is fascinating.  Of all the candidates to sort of team up, who would have picked these two?  I think it’s fantastic, though.  Paul can drive me insane on certain things (no, it’s not our fault that Iran wants to exterminate Israel), but he’s very correct on debt and spending issues.  And without Paul’s tenacity, those issues would be less likely to be discussed.

So – will Ron Paul work to put his troops to use in a potential Romney campaign?  Will they work for Romney?

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Santorum’s answer on No Child Left Behind was terrible.  He’s right that politics is a team sport, and sometimes you vote for something you don’t like in order to advance a broader agenda that you do.  I don’t really have any problem with that.  But NCLB was too big for that, especially for a guy whose signature concern is supposedly children and the family.  And again, it doesn’t give me any confidence that Santorum will be able to rein in spending to any significant degree.

Like Santorum, I also used to support NCLB, but that’s because I was far more casual about my commitment to federalism.  Indeed, its failures helped me understand just why federalism is such a critical principle to enforcing a limited government.

So if Santorum already knew how terrible such Washington-centric programs were, why would he vote for it?  What did he get in exchange that overall advanced the conservative agenda?

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The “describe yourself in one word” question might have been the stupidest question ever in a Presidential debate.  Why, why, why did Newt Gingrich not say that, and refuse to answer it?  Why didn’t any of them?  This isn’t “The Dating Game,” for crying out loud.

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Finally, if you need a good recap like I did, I always suggest Stephen Green’s drunkblog, for all of your politically significant TV moments.