Partisans hoping for a White House, Senate, and House of Representatives trifecta victory next Tuesday should think again if they care anything about the fiscal future of the country.
So says a just-published report issued by the New York-based Manhattan Institute arguing that the best possible combination win for fiscal sanity would be a Kamala Harris presidential victory, balanced by the Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress.
In proclaiming the benefits of a split election day decision, policy analyst Brian Riedl contends that “when a Republican Congress is paired with a Democratic president, both the GOP’s natural deficit-hawk rhetoric and its partisan aspirations of curbing the president’s ambitions point in the same direction.”
“The most fiscally irresponsible outcomes have occurred when Republicans or Democrats win control of both Congress and the White House,” continues the essay, resulting in a compliant Congress happily rubber-stamping any big dollar proposal sent to it from the White House.
An alternative scenario with a Republican president and Democrat Congress, contends Riedl, has been “much worse for deficit hawks” for the simple reason that the Republican occupants of the White House have often surprisingly been “operationally more interested in providing new benefits to voters,” with Congressional Democrats “generally eager to make a deal if they can share in the benefits.”
Riedl points to what some fiscal conservatives may regard as the almost heyday of spending restraint: the six years between 1994 and 2000 when Democrat President Bill Clinton was able to see a surprising amount of his programs win approval from a Republican Congress spearheaded for most of that time by Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Clinton and the Republican Congress managed to negotiate the 1997 budget deal that spirited unprecedented budget surpluses the following year, a legislative triumph that led to the successful passage of smaller bills proposed by Clinton and approved by the Congressional Republicans.
The dynamic of this particular divided government was also spirited by the personalities of Clinton and Gingrich, noted then White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. “They were constantly coming up with new ideas about how to solve problems.”
Wall Street liked the comity it saw in Washington, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 11,000 by the end of the decade.
Just as significant, the American public responded: according to statistics compiled by the survey National Election Studies, some 44% of respondents by the late 1990s said they trusted the federal government either “most of the time” or “just about always,” compared to 22% today.
November 1, 2024
By Garry Boulard
Photo Courtesy of Pixabay
