Pledge to America discounts fiscal responsibility

On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week feels like a triumph for the tea party.

The pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on "self-appointed elites," praise for Americans' speaking out "in town halls and on public squares" and pledges "to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers."

But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the tea party movement, but they've evaded its most admirable substance.

The tea party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it's the conviction that Republicans as much as Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.

Tea partyers have a point. Officially, the Republican Party stands for low taxes and limited government. But save during the gridlocked 1990s, Republican majorities and Republican presidents have tended to pass tax cuts while putting off spending cuts till a tomorrow that never comes.

Conservatives have justified this failure with two incompatible theories. One is "starve the beast," which holds that tax cuts will force government spending downward. The other is the happy idea that tax cuts actually increase government revenue, making deficit anxieties irrelevant.

The real world hasn't been kind to either notion. Cutting taxes without cutting spending may make voters more likely to support big government, because spending feels like a free lunch. And while some tax cuts can raise government revenue, the income-tax cuts of the Bush years emphatically did not.

The House Republicans don't invoke starve-the-beast in their 2010 pledge or pretend that renewing the Bush tax cuts would single-handedly push the nation into the black. But their fiscal vision has the same kind of free-lunchism that the tea party supposedly abhors: It promotes low taxes without identifying the spending cuts required to pay for them.