Bruce Bartlett is awesome

I recently discussed an article by Bruce Bartlett to talk about how much Reagan loved raising taxes.  Now, I just want to talk about how generally awesome Bruce Bartlett is.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Bruce Bartlett is probably a Republican.  I say probably because he is definitely conservative, but his recent writing is definitely at odds with the party’s leadership.  And that’s a good thing.

Barlett today has two primary outlets: his column at Forbes and his blog, Capital Gains and Games.  On the blog, he has argued that we should not cut the payroll tax, supply side economics has served its usefulness (which means overall taxes are at a good level), Reagonimics is dead (from Money magazine), and that more taxes will be necessary to repay our deficit.  Remember, this guy was an operative in the Reagan revolution, so these words are not to be taken lightly.

On Forbes, he has also argued against cutting the payroll tax. He also argued for the necessity of Obama’s stimulus bill.

On Politico.com, he argued that the GOP must accept that the welfare state will not disappear and is in fact appreciated by the vast majority of Americans.  The question for Republicans should be, as it was for Eisenhower, how to make government run better while providing the services citizens want.  (This is what David Cameron, and the rest of Europe, has realized.)  The sight of crazies telling the government to keep its hands out of Medicare hopefully persuaded the ideologues to lurch to the left on this issue.

In other words, Barlett is full of sensible ideas.  It shows you how far to the right Republicans have jumped when a Reagan operative is seen as moderate.  And if you compare him to unions which don’t want to raise taxes or Obama keeping most of Bush’s tax cuts in place, he even seems quite progressive.