When Republicans eventually retake the White House, Chait expects them to follow Bush’s example of fiscal recklessness. Douthat sees another way forward:
[T]he Bush playbook and the Tea Party playbook do not exhaust the options for the right.
The signal fiscal failure of the Bush era was not a willingness to spend more money in some areas (defense, education, foreign aid, prescription drugs) while cutting tax rates overall; it was the failure to successfully pair the rate cuts and new spending with the kind of tax and entitlement reforms that would have left the country on a sounder footing for the long term. (If the Medicare Part D expansion had been combined the reforms to Medicare the Bush White House originally wanted, if the push Social Security reform hadn’t gone nowhere, and if tax reform hadn’t died along with the rest of Bush’s second term ambitions, then the entire Bush agenda would have made more fiscal sense.)
So the question for our (still-hypothetical) future era of Republican governance is whether the right can combine a shift away from austerity-only policymaking with a continued commitment to the kind of entitlement reform proposals that the House G.O.P. has rallied around over the last few years. That’s the test: If you can introduce Ryan-style premium support for Medicare and do a real cleanup of the tax code, there’s room to experiment with a larger child tax credit or stronger work supports or payroll tax cuts or what-have-you without blowing out the deficit.
The Dish 