As much as Fox News host Tucker Carlson considers himself a man of the people, he’s still a creature of of the Beltway intellectual class.
That is, he believes the sort of folks he knows from green rooms and think tank panels are emblematic of America’s politics. This showed during his strangely laudatory monologue directed towards the newly nationalistic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Carlson isn’t wrong about the Democratic Party’s left-wing pivot. Look at how nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates back abortion up until the point of birth and advocate taxpayer funding for abortion by repealing the Hyde Amendment.
But Carlson’s description of the Republican Party is a straw man. Where are these supposedly “libertarian zealots” in Congress? Where are the policymakers actually trying to cut entitlements?
I ask because we need some.
In the next two decades, Social Security and Medicare will become insolvent. Social Security is already paying out more than it takes in. The two together will drive 90% of our deficit growth in the next decade.
The last time we saw our national debt approach 100% of our GDP was because of World War II. With unhinged liberals touting $32.6 trillion “Medicare for all” packages and $93 trillion “Green New Deals,” we aren’t even talking about increased taxation being enough to cover the bare bones of our interest. As the interest we owe begins to spiral and investment capital dries up with lack of confidence in the United States government, the entire American credit system could come to a halt.
We elected a generation of Republicans to Congress under the Tea Party promise that they would scale back the size and scope of government, and most importantly curtail the entitlement spending that is overwhelmingly responsible for our debt crisis. The problem isn’t that they followed through on it as heartless libertarians. The problem is that most of them were liars.
Carlson is surely correct that our leadership class hasn’t engaged in the “economic patriotism” he and Warren celebrate. If they loved their country, they would have reformed our entitlement leviathan long ago.
