Former top Reagan adviser Ed Meese said last night that New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer was dreaming if he thinks the Reagan vision of limited government is dead.
“Reaganism is alive and kicking,” Meese told the State Policy Network, a group of representatives from free market think-tanks from across America yesterday evening at the Heritage Foundation.
Meese was responding to statements Schumer had made to the editors of the New York Daily News early this week. “The old Reagan theory which dominated—which is, 'Government is bad, it's out of touch, chop off its hands as soon as it moves’ is over,” Schumer continued. “Reaganomics is dead, that the Reagan philosophy is dead.”
Meese said Schumer’s wishful thinking is in direct contradiction to reality as evidenced by the booming economy and the 30-year-low average jobless rates that were the exact predictions of the supply-side theory known as Reaganomics.
The former attorney general and close friend of the 40th President admitted that Iraq had its negative affects in the recent mid-term elections and that the Republican leadership had lost its way, “seemingly working hard to prove Lord Acton’s warning that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
“But the midterm results had many moderate Republicans losing and quite a few conservative Democrats winning,” he said, “and recent polls show, a majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, want smaller government, lower taxes and less spending—which was always the platform of the Reagan Revolution.”
Meese’s claims were based on new polling data from the Club for Growth on Democrats, Independents and Republicans from the across the country that show, among other things, a majority of voters (57.3%) want candidates who will cut spending and even more favor making permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, including the elimination of the death tax.
Meese went on to quote the Club for Growth’s analysis: “Despite the clear rejection of the Republican Party on fiscal issues, there remains widespread majority appeal for the principles of lower taxes and smaller government. Even independent swing voters show strong majority support for extending the 2003 income, capital gains, and dividend tax rate cuts, as well as permanently eliminating the death tax. They also show solid majority support for reducing federal spending, even if that means reducing spending in their own districts!”
Meese ended by citing examples of local activist’s across the land who have preserved the small government values and vision of Ronald Reagan. The main example he cited were the many states in the country where grass-roots activists implemented legal steps to protect average American citizens from the Supreme Court’s recent disastrous Kelo imminent domain decision, which is a perfect example of bad, out of touch, big government.
