At Least One North Dakota Democrat Is Going To Campaign Like A Liberal

With President Barack Obama looming like a political albatross over state congressional races, most of North Dakota’s Democrat candidates have decided to campaign like Republicans. Both Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp and House candidate Pam Gulleson lambasted President Obama over his decision to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline, and in a recent article in The Hill Heitkamp went the extra mile and declared how anxious she is to work in the Senate with her former Republican political rival John Hoeven.

Gulleson and Heitkamp, savvy political insiders both, recognize that the demise of the erstwhile, all-Democrat “Team North Dakota” (Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan along with Rep. Earl Pomeroy) had a lot to do with those men no longer being taken seriously as the conservative Democrats they pretended to be. They know that to get elected in North Dakota they must manufacture their own mythology of conservative ideology.

But Senate candidate Tom Potter, who is challenging Heitkamp for the Democrat nomination, is putting on no such airs. He’s intent on being a liberal ideologue to the end, making tax hikes central to his platform:

Potter said changing the economic gap will require serious reforms, especially to the tax code, to restore balance and get the federal government’s budget back on track.

The long-term average of federal revenue as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product is about 18 percent, while government spending averages about 20 percent. That 2 percent gap annually has led to the nation’s growing debt, which is now approaching 100 percent of GDP, he said.

“We need to get revenues up to average expenditures like they were in the Clinton years, and that will take care of the deficit problem,” he said.

Potter, of course, has little chance of getting his party’s nomination. He’ll be patted on the head and mollified by Democrat leadership on their way to anointing Potter. But what’s useful about Potter is that he espouses a more genuine sort of liberalism. Put another way, while Heitkamp and Gulleson campaign as though they were card-carrying members of the NDGOP, Potter represents how they’ll likely govern.

And Potter’s position is utter nonsense. He’s right that, throughout the history of this country whether taxes are high or low the amount of revenues the federal government collects in taxes really doesn’t stray far from 18%. That’s because as taxes get higher, Americans do more to avoid them. Businesses close or move out of the country. Americans engage in less economic activity. Tax fraud soars. That’s because there’s only so much taxation Americans will put up with.

It’s like any economic market. If prices get too high they’ll be undercut by a competitor, or where competition isn’t possible a black market will form.

So for Potter to say that we can solve our nation’s problems by increasing revenues (code for tax hikes) is just plain nonsense. The problem is spending, not revenue.