Here is why The Pledge has failed. Time and again, it has contributed to the GOP tendency to make taxes their top priority, deficits be damned. As Kevin Williamson puts it at National Review, "Republicans led by naïve supply-siders are preparing, for the third time in my life, to sell their souls on spending cuts in exchange for tax-rate reductions that are small, ineffective, and sure to be temporary. Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts, but he went to his grave waiting for those spending cuts. George W. Bush got his tax cuts, and ended his presidency with spending soaring and his entitlement-reform program in the garbage. And now certain Republicans are starting to slobber over the Gang of Six plan."

What Norquist doesn't understand or won't admit is that deficit spending is worse than a tax increase, because you've got to pay for it eventually anyway, with interest. Meanwhile, you've created in the public mind the illusion that the level of government services they're consuming is cheaper and less burdensome than is in fact the case. If you hold the line on taxes but not the deficit, you're making big government more palatable.

Back in 1986, if taxes had been raised every time federal spending had increased, and voters knew that taxes would go up again every time new federal programs or spending was passed, the backlash against big government that we're seeing now would've started a lot sooner, and been much more broad-based. Had that been the policy, it's doubtful that George W. Bush would've passed Medicare Part D. Instead, the Baby Boomers have borrowed a bunch of money that my generation and my children's generation is going to have to pay back. But their taxes didn't go up. Thanks for that, Mr. Norquist. I'm not sure what to call it, but fiscal conservatism isn't it.

As the conservative movement laments our fiscal straits, and the dire situation the nation finds itself in, perhaps it is too much to ask that they assign Norquist a little bit of the blame. But surely they can at least recognize that the solution he's been pushing since the Reagan Administration hasn't worked.





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