It Really Was The Spending, Stupid

Big Government: The Tea Party has so influenced the national discourse that the question is no longer, "Is spending really the problem?" Now it's: "Which kind of government spending is worst?"

Washington may just have felt a taste of what life on the Left Coast is like, with a 5.9 earthquake leading to the evacuation of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.

In fact, the earth alongside the Potomac has been shaking for some time — first with the Tea Party "town hells" liberal members of Congress experienced two years ago, then with the election of the Tea Party-backed Scott Brown to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, and finally, big-spending President Obama's rock-bottom disapproval ratings.

Conservative candidates used to fear campaigning on spending because liberal lawmakers had so successfully hooked local constituencies on pork barrel projects. Talk tax cuts instead, their consultants told them.

That's now changed. Faith in government to solve problems has diminished. A new Rasmussen Reports poll, for instance, just found that 49% of Americans believe government programs actually increase poverty.

The question that faces the GOP's presidential nominee and congressional candidates in November 2012 is: Should we blast Democrats on their wasteful spending of 2009-10 or should we focus on their failure to reform fiscally doomed entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare?

An article Tuesday in the Washington Examiner by Byron York, "Spending, Not Entitlements, Created Huge Deficit," describes the issues at stake. Why did Washington spend $2.728 trillion in fiscal year 2007 vs. $3.629 trillion for 2011?

"Did everyone suddenly turn 65 and begin collecting Social Security and using Medicare?" a sarcastic York asks. No, there was "an explosion in spending related to the economic downturn and the rise of Democrats to power in Washington." As grave as the growing entitlement crisis is, says York, "Washington's current spending problem lies elsewhere."

Should the argument be: Let's just go back to pre-2008 financial crisis spending levels? After all, didn't the Democrats controlling Washington often tell us that their new spending was only temporary?

Even the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last year conceded that cutting spending to 2007 levels and keeping it there would erase the deficit.

Of course, inflation plus demographic changes would mean that the 2007 federal budget wouldn't go as far today or tomorrow as it did then.

Thanks to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., fixing Social Security and Medicare is no longer a topic Republicans fear to discuss.

But York's suggestion that the 2012 campaigns should be about "undoing the damage done by Obama and his Democratic allies" and leaving the entitlement war for another day has its advantages.

The chief one: It preempts White House demagoguery about Republicans wanting to throw grandma out into the snow. Then we can have a real debate over spending, and let the American people sort it out.