Ramesh Ponnuru has a good piece in the NYT on how conservatives should go about achieving the same ends today that Ronald Reagan worked towards in the 1980s. His main thesis is that conservatives, however, face very different circumstances today than they did back then. Simply enacting the same policies the same way as Reagan did makes lawmakers blind to the circumstances of our day. An example:
When Reagan cut rates for everyone, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the income tax was the biggest tax most people paid. Now neither of those things is true: For most of the last decade the top rate has been 35 percent, and the payroll tax is larger than the income tax for most people. Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan’s day. House Republicans have repeatedly voted to bring the top rate down still further, to 25 percent.
A Republican Party attentive to today’s problems rather than yesterday’s would work to lighten the burden of the payroll tax, not just the income tax. An expanded child tax credit that offset the burden of both taxes would be the kind of broad-based middle-class tax relief that Reagan delivered. Republicans should make room for this idea in their budgets, even if it means giving up on the idea of a 25 percent top tax rate.
The means must be tailored to achieve the same ends, albeit in difference circumstances. This does not mean that the answer is to throw Reagan's principles under the bus. Those principles after all were mainly the principles of the Founders, Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge (although Coolidge was perhaps the most successful in achieving them, at least economically anyway). But what this does mean is that conservatives should have the same ends in mind but work under different circumstances to achieve those ends, which, if they see things clearly, are grounded in the law of nature and nature's God.
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