Dramatic Balanced Budget Speech Could Save McCarthy

As of this reporting, the Kevin McCarthy speaker nomination balloting is in its ninth iteration. It doesn’t look promising. Despite plenty of midnight meetings, innumerable concessions, spear-throwing on both sides, personality slurs, and even lately some policy discussions, the McCarthy needle has not moved. Mr. McCarthy so far will go down in history as tying the modern record of nine ballots set in 1923 by Calvin Coolidge’s man, Frederick Gillett. Are we now headed for the all-time record of 133 ballots in 1856? Truthfully, I have no idea how this turns out, when it ends, with whom it ends. I’m going to assume that the House Republican conference prefers a Republican speaker to the Democrat leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and I still think in our representative democracy this GOP family quarrel, as difficult as it looks right now, will yield some very positive results. One thing I hope comes out of this is a clarification of what the GOP House intends to do. What specifically is their forward agenda for growth and prosperity, for energy independence, for tackling the border disaster, for a balanced budget? A problem that I think has plagued my friend Kevin McCarthy, though I remain a supporter, is that the Commitment to America was vague and hazy on some important issues. My phone calls with House members and senior staff again and again surface the issue of a strong conservative desire for an absolute commitment to a balanced budget. You will recall that I’ve talked for quite some time about the need for a pro-growth balanced budget, as an organizing principle for a future prosperity vision. Newt Gingrich favors the balanced budget. A former Trump OMB director, Russ Vought, unveiled his vision of a balanced budget on my show a few weeks ago. In numerous interviews with Republican House leaders, they’ve expressed support for a balanced budget — but this didn’t make it into the Commitment to America, and I think it’s fair to say it is not a topic that they’ve pounded away on, that they haven’t erased all doubt about their fidelity to that core economic principle. Yet I have found in recent days that while personality clashes proliferate, the one policy that comes up among Freedom Caucus members and frankly many other Republicans who are for Mr. McCarthy is the need for an iron-clad balanced budget commitment. That doesn’t mean you’ll get a balanced budget, which is always subject to economic fluctuations — but it does mean that the leadership and the Budget Committee and the Ways and Means Committee and the Rules Committee and other committees will, as a first order of business, start working on a balanced budget. This would include not only substantial spending restraint, but also a commitment to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. That second idea was also not in the Commitment to America. Additionally, getting rid of the $80 billion for 87,000 new IRS agents would be part of the balanced budget commitment. Plus, a new mandate for spending caps, and a new mandate for pay-go, which means any new spending must be funded by spending cut offsets. Also, a commitment to dynamic scoring where lower tax rates, less spending, workfare work requirements — which must be part of this package — would be creating new incentives for the kind of 4 percent or 5 percent economic growth that this country is capable of generating, coming off a prolonged Biden-esque slump. In addition: the concept of regular order. For the budget, that means a budget resolution, 12 appropriation bills, from appropriation committees that will hold open hearings to discuss and debate spending levels and policies. Regular order is so important as a rule. It’s a budget rule, but it also should be applied to any number of things — like the best tax system, or the best immigration system, or the best education system. No 4,000-page omnibus anythings. Regular order brings order. It also clarifies key policies for the country and is the adult way of dealing with the challenges that lie ahead. I have suggested that Mr. McCarthy give a speech about balanced budgets, Trump tax cuts, energy independence, regular order, growth and prosperity. Whether he gives this speech on the floor of the House or in the next meeting of the Republican conference, I suppose is up to him. A dramatic speech giving absolute clarity on issues that were really very fussy in the Commitment to America would help Mr. McCarthy’s speakership quest, and, at the end of the day, would help the Republican Party tell voters what it really believes in. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.

Dramatic Balanced Budget Speech Could Save McCarthy

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