Posted by
Bert Chapman on Monday, December 22, 2008 1:29:08 PM
I'm making a few modest suggestions for a revival of conservative political fortunes and my post today will stress economic issues. I agree with other conservatives in this debate who emphasize that conservatives need to address the economic anxieties of working and middle class taxpayers. While supply side or monetarist economic theory, have inherent intellectual value and economic merit, by themselves they do not address the concerns of average Americans. To regain the trust of Americans seduced by Obama, and regain political power, Conservatives must realize that most Americans are concerned with meeting their current economic needs and having enough money saved for economic contingencies they can anticipate. In the field of health care, we need to stress that people take proper care of themselves through dieting, exercise, and getting enough sleep while also promoting policies that promote greater consumer medical choice in the fields of insurance policy purchasing, prescription drug purchasing, having choice in the doctors and specialists we choose to go to, insurance policy portability and in promoting medical savings accounts to plan for unexpected medical contingencies.
Conservatives need to deemphasize tax cuts and reassert the importance of government budgets being in balance and in providing efficient and well-administered governmental programs which meet the real world needs of individuals and families. The ongoing bailouts of incompetent spendthrift auto companies and subprime mortage lending institutions are great opportunities to warn Americans of the consequences of reckless spending and incompetent management and how each of us will individually pay for these bailouts our of our own pocketbooks and with higher prices and greater regulation of these services. Conservatives should also use these bailouts as an illustration of our excessive reliance on personal and business credit and place more emphasis on paying for goods and services up front and saving for the future in order to get high price items such as houses and cars at more reasonable rates. These bailouts are also teachable opportunities to explain the evils of going deeper into debt and how such debt will seriously restrict the financial autonomy of individual Americans, American companies seeking to hire new workers, and the ability of local, state, and federal governments to function with optimum fiscal independence due to owing large sums of money to commercial creditors, other governments, and domestic and foreign credit and/or governmental sources.
Conservatives need to encourage Americans to rediscover the importance of personal savings accounts and investments in prudent conservative long-term investments such as Treasury Bills instead of risky speculative stock market transactions such as options. We should promote a shareholder society by focusing on prudent financial planning instead of a delusory belief in speculative bubbles of dubious get rich get schemes which Western economic history repeatedly demonstrates will disappear with often catastrophic effects.
We need to promote entitlement reform so current and future generations are not saddled with debt and have reasonable prospects for financing the health care and living expenses of their retirement years without having to saddle their families and other taxpayers with onerous debts. We need to jettison the utopian nonsense that all Americans are entitled to home homes without the economic resources to meet their mortgage obligations. We also should take initiatives to promote conservative consumer oriented economic planning into the educational curriculum of public and private primary and secondary schools.
These economic difficulties are also excellent opportunities for parents to have frank discussions with their children about economic realities and such discussions should also occur in churches and other religious institutions. Difficult times like these can contain the seeds for political revival and for conservatives to rediscover the importance of saving and prudent economic planning and sharing these virtues with others who do not necessarily share our ideological predispositions but can materially and morally benefit from applying these principles to their lives.