PEOPLE'S REPUBLICANS

Cambridge’s own Senate candidate, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, has clearly hit a nerve with a video recorded by a supporter at a fundraising event. Liberals are thrilled by the tingle running up their leg, while conservatives feel like they’re in the dentist’s chair without Novocain.

Warren’s opponent Scott Brown is even using the video for its fundraising. It would be politics as usual if she had been caught in flagrante delicto, saying something she didn’t mean, or something she meant but knew she shouldn’t say in public. She was however expressing her core beliefs with righteous indignation. The Warren campaign has not issued any apologies or denials. To the contrary, the video is praised on leftist websites like Daily Kos and acclaimed by her supporters.

It would be nice if Ms. Warren presented a Keynes vs. Hayek moment, where opposing viewpoints on the role of government in the economy are laid out with clarity. Unfortunately, Ms. Warren’s arguments are filled with lazy clichés, unwarranted assumptions and incorrect facts.

The Warren video begins with a cartoonish explanation of the “hole we’re in”– our $14 trillion deficit:

$1 trillion on tax cuts for the rich under George Bush…2 trillion dollars on two wars…1 trillion dollars on a Medicare drug program that a) was not paid for and b) is 40% more expensive than it needs to be because it was a giveaway to the drug companies. So there’s 4 trillion right there. So part of the way you fix this problem is like don’t do those things.

In response:

–Tax cuts are not spending, and it is simplistic to assume that a $1 tax cut adds $1 to the deficit. Many argue that tax cuts increase revenue by stimulating growth. In any case, raising taxes does not address our spending problem, any more than a shot of vodka cures alcoholism.

–The Congressional Research Service reports total expenditures of $1.2 trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan through 2011, and $1.8 trillion through 2021. Cost estimates vary wildly according to political bias, but future costs are not part of the current “hole we’re in.”

–I have no idea how you calculate that something is “40% more expensive than it needs to be,” but according to the Medicare trustees, Medicare Part D spending is 32% less than the original CBO estimate, costing a total of $375 billion from 2004 and 2013. And what does it mean that it “was not paid for”? If we run a deficit, some items aren’t paid for, but which ones?

Rather than $4 trillion, Warren’s examples total $1.575 trillion of potential cuts from the spending side–assuming we can simply not “do those things” without incurring other costs.

The 11 budgets under Presidents Bush and Obama (2002-2012) add up to $31.5 trillion. Thus if we cut all the liberal bogeymen we are still left with $29.9 trillion in spending and huge deficits, which Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, will only increase.

The second part of the Warren video has been quoted widely. She begins with the statement, “There is no one in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” She then admonishes a hypothetical factory owner, telling him that paying taxes is part of the social contract that “pays forward” “the work the rest of us did.” Her examples are the perennial clichés trotted out by big spending liberals: without taxes, we wouldn’t have public roads, public schools, police and fire fighters (which, one might notice, with the exception of Interstate highways, are funded by state and local, not federal taxes).

Big government enthusiasts like Warren fall back on the straw man argument that there are only two possibilities: a benevolent federal government, and anarchy. If you express concern that government seems to be getting larger and larger, and seems to have reached the point where our economy and our freedoms are endangered, Warren’s response would be, so you don’t believe in hiring policemen? You want to abandon society to “marauding gangs”? You want to let people’s houses burn down and leave our children uneducated? Of course, any of these services could be provided by the private sector, but this isn’t the point; it’s the gobs and gobs of other inessential wasteful stuff that government insists it must do for us that a majority of Americans don’t want.

According to recent Gallup statistics:

–a record high 81 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed.

–57 percent have little or no confidence in the federal government to solve domestic problems,

–49 percent of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

Elizabeth Warren is clearly out of step with the country. I hope the same is not true of Massachusetts voters.

Peter Wilson lives on Huron Avenue and is Secretary of the Cambridge Republican City Committee.