Why Doesn’t Obama Give Us 5% Growth?
Tim Pawlenty has a plan that will deliver GDP growth of 5% per year for the next ten years. This plan accomplishes something that no recent president, including Reagan or Clinton, has been able to accomplish by implementing the full wish list of conservative economic policy. Drastic cuts in government expenditures, large income tax cuts and reduction to just two brackets and zeroing out taxes on capital.
Let’s enter thought experiment land where Pawlenty’s plan is a serious one that could achieve the goals that he says it can, that it’s not just “a series of Reagan-era applause lines bulked up on steroids and then stitched together for public consumption.” Actually, that’s a little too outlandish. Let’s pretend that Tim Pawlenty thinks that implementing his plan would result in ten consecutive years of 5%+ growth. How does Tim Pawlenty explain Obama not embracing it? It is not like Pawlenty is the first conservative to have this approach to fiscal issues and too have a broadly similar budget wish list. For conservatives, lower taxes on investment income will always result in breakneck growth. Surely Pawlenty thinks that President Obama is a crafty politician who wants to be reelected. Surely Pawlenty knows that if President Obama had started delivering 5% GDP growth in 2010, his reelection would be an afterthought.
Sure, Obama has certain fundamental beliefs that would mitigate against embracing the conservative agenda of tax cuts on capital and spending cuts for the poor. And it would probably drive his base and supporters crazy. But the connection between a very healthy economy and reelection is not obscure. If non-inflation-driven growth of 5% per year could just be achieved, all presidents would do whatever it took to achieve it. But I doubt Pawlenty really can’t explain to himself why Obama has not embraced his supply side agenda. This is not like health care reform, where even if it worked out as well as its most ardent advocates said it would, it could still alienate much of the public. 5+ percent growth for a decade is the be-all, end-all of policymaking for a president.
Think of the Pawlenty plan, and supply-siderism more generally, as being like the One Ring, except without any of the down sides (after all, tax cuts increase revenues). Pawlenty almost certainly thinks that Obama is a crafty politician who is more concerned with amassing power and winning reelection than anything else. Yet I doubt Pawlenty ever really wonders why Obama has not just implemented his one plan to bring growth to them all.
