Ryan Streeter
The rest of 2010 in Washington will be spent working out the tax cut deal and batting around issues that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are eager to ram through before they lose their grip (if they ever had it) on the 111th Congress.
So it's not too early to start thinking about 2011, a year all of us hope will be better than 2010. We could all use higher employment rates, more home sales, rising disposable incomes, and greater security.
Conservatives have the ideas needed to help these kinds of New Year's wishes to come true. But we need to get better at formulating, communicating, and implementing them.
Our ConservativeHome100 panel prioritizes comprehensive personal and business tax reform as well as reforming our burgeoning entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. If more conservatives embrace these objectives in the new year, 2011 will be more conservative than 2010, even if we don't get all the laws passed we would like.
ConservativeHome will be pushing for a more conservative 2011. Here are some of the themes we will visit over and again toward that end:
Shared sacrifice now, so our children have growth later. If we are going to fix our fiscal mess, we are all of us going to have to support reforms that are perhaps more radical than we would like. ConservativeHome will be promoting the kinds of changes we need to embrace in Social Security and Medicare on everything from raising retirement ages to saving more now so the government spends less later. "Entitlement reform" is no longer the domain of policy wonks in Washington. It is something all Americans need to understand and embrace if we care about a growing economy for the next generation. Intergenerational justice, if you will, is not primarily about climate change these days; it's about reducing the deficit burden on our economy so that it can really grow again.
Growth measured by its effect on the average family and small enterprise. Middle class families should see their disposable income rise, and small businesses should be flourishing. Wages stagnated over the past decade in middle America primarily because of exploding health care costs. So for starters, we need a growth agenda centered on limiting and then rolling back Obamacare. But we can't stop there. We need to invest in human capital and a more favorable enterprise environment. We will revisit this theme over and again - but in a way that assesses the best policies and ideas not by how they enrich bankers and the upper class, but how they raise the incomes of middle income families and foster new business growth.
Commitment to security and winning our wars. Public support and understanding of what is going on in our ongoing struggle against our enemies around the world is at a low. This is not the time to retreat from resourcing our military and doubling down on our efforts to make the world safer for trade and democratic institutions. Tom Mahnken makes this point today on Platform. If we are bullish on the middle class at ConservativeHome, we are hawkish about foreign policy and our armed forces.
A smarter Republican party. The GOP needs to be the party of ideas again. At ConservativeHome, we will call out potential 2012 candidates if they are not being morally serious enough about ideas, as we have done here recently with Sarah Palin. We will call out Members of Congress if they waffle on the economy or confronting our entitlement challenge. And we will promote the hard-headed approach to problem solving by aspiring candidates and elected officials.
Here's to a more conservative 2011.
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