what's next if we capture Senate?

The first races of the Senate in 2014 are starting to get polled and there are some surprises already.  Mitch McConnell of KY, thought to be toast, is running ahead of his Dem opponent. The Carl Levin Memorial seat in Michigan, which the Democrat  held for 6 terms is now open, and the R is ahead by two points in two polls.  Democrat Hagan in NC is behind every hypothetical R they can guess and has favorablitiy of 43%.  She’s toast.   Scott Brown now says he will run in NH.  He is ahead of Shaheen in a poll.  There are eleven other races that will probably be close.  Of all Senate races, the Republicans have to net 6 wins. 

So let’s imagine a Senate run by R’s as well as the House.  What then should they do.  Here’s what Mitch Daniels of Indiana says in his book should be our ultimate strategy.  I would have to think this would be somewhat the strategy of Congressional R’s.  First Daniels says we should seek to liberate the job creators and get the economy going again.  But with a highly partisan Prez and Dems in Congress, this will be hard to do.  Worse, the 800 pound gorilla is the SS and MC programs that are going broke, i.e. won’t self-finance and require funding from general budget.  NO chance getting something done until R’s capture presidency or someone less idealogical comes along.   So then Congress must concentrate on what it can do.  Defund.

First a major downsizing of the federal bureaucracy.  A hiring freeze would be best (with exceptions channeled through OMB).  Once Congress can pass an annual budget that is conservative this should be possible.  Of course Oblamer would veto and scream about shutting gov’t down.  But R’s could counter with a continuing resolution to fund gov’t with ZERO percent increases, not the 8% increases of Harry Reid.  Let Oblamer come to the negotiating table or let him live with no increases.  Second, there should be a federal pay freeze until federal salaries are more in line with private sector jobs. Let Obluster rage about how the avg. fed worker only makes $82K a year and that’s not a Living Wage. Third, Obamacare should be repealed and replaced.  The R’s have already proposed this.  Fourth, no area of the budget should be off limits, including Defense. But especially we could cut EPA and their regulations from hell that are killing business expansion.

Fifth item is for the executive branch to reinstate the power of impoundment, but that ability to stop the bureaucrats from spending all their budget won’t happen until we get a Republican President. Sixth, the CBO and GAO estimates of federal revenue coming in are being based on 4.5% growth.  US growth for the last 5 years of the recovery has been 1.6%.  2013 was 1.8.  With a Republican Congress we could at least restore sanity to CBO estimates.  This would add yet another nail in the coffin of Obamacare and illuminate national debt problems. 

Seven, fix the tax system.  This realistically would probably not be proposed until an R has become Prez, but Daniels points out that our present system locks up 6.6 billion hours of filing time on the part of private industry and people.  It costs $194 in preparation.  It leads to a terrifying IRS which has now shown it targets conservatives.  And the Dem dream of taxing the rich has only killed jobs.  2/3 of the upper 20% of income earners are small businessmen who create 70% of new jobs. Also the current 35% tax on corporations is keeping at least $11 trillion earned by US subsidiaries, locked up abroad.  Cut the tax and bring the capital home to create American jobs and growth.

Daniels then says that we should demolish many federal welfare programs except perhaps for the utterly destitute and replace with a negative income tax.  The NIT is like a larger version of the Earned Income Tax Credit.  That is, you give the poor money directly in lieu of all the complex welfare programs that employ vast numbers of federal workers and suck up most of the money for overhead.  NIT trusts the clients to order their own lives and start getting responsible.  Doubtful that Congress alone would do this, but a good suggestion.

Number 9 is regulatory relief in the form of slapping down executive orders that Obama has done.  He may have a pen and phone but we have a Constitution and Laws. Regulatory pay-go is a good solution—demanding the elimination of one rule before another can be instigated.  Better is a multi-year moratorium on new fed regulations.  Number 10 is to override Obama on energy.  Override him on Keystone pipeline and approve it.  (Strangely State Dept. has approved Keystone but because of the NB sand hills environmentalism, they have deferred to the Prez.  Clearly he wants to kill Keystone by putting it in limbo.) Drill baby drill the offshore blocks and federal lands.  Reduce the insane ethanol subsidies in the name of international starvation due to high corn prices. Reduce but don’t eliminate subsidies for wind and solar as exorbitant. The ethanol, wind, solar arguments should be couched in terms of “too much but we still want to encourage alternatives”.  This would be hard for Dems to argue against politically.  

So there you go, Mitch’s 10-point plan which would probably be partly implementable with an R Congress. It is also probably close to intents of most R's in Congress.   Once we get an R for President we can then tackle the big gorilla of what to do about MC and SS.