As part of his ongoing struggle to gain support and credibility from the right ing, Tim Pawlenty has announced his plan to sign the “Cut, Cap, Balance” pledge. Sponsored by Let Freedom Ring and 49 other conservative groups, the pledge asks candidates to work for “substantial cuts in spending that will reduce the deficit next year and thereafter, enforceable spending caps that will put federal spending on a path to a balanced budget" and “congressional passage of a balanced budget amendment,” but only if it includes both a “spending limitation and a super-majority for raising taxes.”
I asked Conor Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, for more detail on the policies he’d like to see. Hanna didn’t set a particular target for spending cuts, but he supports a federal spending cap at 18 percent of GDP, and a balanced budget amendment in line with the one offered by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC). This would mimic the budget introduced by the House Republican Study Committee in April, which, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, would force Congress to slash funding by more than $3 trillion over the next ten years. This includes sharp cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as unimaginably deep cuts to education, environmental protection, food safety, nutrition assistance, and services for the elderly and people with disabilities.
So far, Pawlenty is the only “serious” presidential candidate to sign the pledge (Ron Paul and Herman Cain are also signatories). Regardless, even if every other candidate declines to sign the pledge, it will still affect the contest, as each candidate tries to appeal to the broadest swath of Republican voters. At the most recent presidential debate, Romney offered qualified praise to Pawlenty’s proposal for budget reform (which is similar to the one offered by the Republican Study Committee), and while Jon Huntsman is running as a moderate, that hasn’t kept him from endorsing a balanced budget amendment and Paul Ryan’s budget plan.
In the same way that John Edwards’s health care plan created a baseline for Democratic candidates in 2008, Pawlenty’s decision to embrace right-wing budgeting has pushed the Republican field to embrace disastrous budget cuts and crank economic ideas.
