What do conservatives want?

By Tom Quiner

Perhaps the question is, what is the most burning issue for American conservatives right now?

It depends on the conservative. My guess is that the fiscal insanity in Washington, characterized by unsustainable levels of government spending, ranks at the top of the list for many, maybe most.

Conservatives would like to cut job training and education spending that doesn’t work.

They’d like to cut funding for the EPA, an agency that is destroying jobs through over-regulation.

They’d like to cut energy subsidies being funneled to green energy companies that go broke.

And they’d love to stop sending money to Planned Parenthood.

They have an opportunity to do just that. All they have to do is … nothing. All they have to do is let the sequesters roll.

The president refuses to present responsible, sustainable budgets. The Senate won’t even present a budget.

Everyone warns us that the sequesters would decimate the economy. The Wall Street Journal says they’re wrong, that the sequester, the automatic budget cuts agreed to by both parties and the president if they couldn’t work out a budget deal, is much ado over nothing.

They point out that President Obama increased discretionary spending by 84% in the hope of stimulating the economy. It didn’t work. In fact, you could make the case it made things worse.

The WSJ said the cuts would amount to only .5% of our GDP.

Some worry that the cuts to defense would turn us into a second-rate power. And yet our defense budget now is a third greater than it was a decade ago. We’re out of Iraq and will soon exit Afghanistan.

Perhaps the sequester isn’t such a bad idea.

In fact, the WSJ suggests it would actually be good for the economy:

“The sequester will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment. From 1992-2000 Democrat Bill Clinton and (after 1994) a Republican Congress oversaw budgets that cut federal outlays to 18.2% from 22.1% of GDP. These were years of rapid growth in production and incomes.”

What do conservatives want? Fiscal sanity.

The bi-partisan sequester may be the only way to roll back the Bush and Obama spending sprees.