The Republicans may have spent the last year attacking Obama's stimulus, but I think that the nature of our political system would have encouraged Republicans to pass their own muddled stimulus package if they had been in power. While there is always the argument that divided government would produce gridlock and force policies toward the center, there is the recent example of both Bush's own stimulus and the later TARP bailout under a Democratic Congress. Would the combination of a Democratic President and a Republican Congress work any better? Depending on the pundits you believe, we might be a few months away from finding out.

The GOP increasingly stands for the Graying Old Party. While a narrative focused on the Tea Parties might claim that opposition to socialist and government-run health care is the key to a Republican resurgence, the polls tend to show that most of the shift in the polling from 2008 and 2006 to 2010 is due to changes in turnout based on the natural likelihood, or lack thereof, to vote in a midterm election. While most Democratic-leaning voters still align with the Democratic Party, there is a shift among older voters who voted for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. Is this about socialism, or simply that Republicans have been making the case for most of a year that Democrats are out to cut Medicare?

The Republican Party is not ready to seriously tackle entitlement spending, aside from a few noble exceptions like Paul Ryan. In the long term, entitlement spending like Medicare will be the budget buster, not the normal Republican monsters of earmarks or foreign aid. Add to that military spending, a category that some Republicans are proposing should be tied directly to GDP, and I don't think that the Republicans have any serious proposals for balancing the budget or even managing the deficit.

I've said this before, but it needs repeating that the Republican Party will try to seize the small government mantle because they oppose new spending proposed by the Democratic Party. But they will fight tooth and nail against entitlement reform or cuts to wasteful military programs. In switching to the Republican Party, Griffith highlighted not only his concerns about health care reform but his opposition to Obama's proposed cuts to an assortment of military and space programs that effected his district.

We may not like the Democratic plan to try to reform Medicare and bring down the long term costs to health care, but at least they have a plan. And while I'm not generally enthusiastic about raising taxes, I don't think that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans is the deciding issue in today's political process. Overall, despite the election of Barack Obama and the perception that the Republicans have seized the cause of small government again, I don't really find a compelling case that the Republicans are superior to Democrats on most of the macroeconomic issues.

What we need, and what the Democrats also need, are low cost proposals for economic growth. The political will to tackle entitlement reform, cut defense spending, and clean up the tax code doesn't exist. There are serious problems in the long term with our nation's finances, problems that are growing grimmer the longer they are ignored. With the recent economic crisis creating the very real possibility that our economy will have permanently higher levels of unemployment, unemployment that will devastate a generation of workers, we need political solutions focused on fostering economic growth.

But what?

The Republicans used to have a narrative for economic growth, even if it proved ineffective. Tax cuts on capital and investment, wealth flows into business investments that trickle into research and development. Economic growth! Instead, we got a Wall Street bubble that spread to housing and brought down the entire economy when it burst.

So far the only Democratic narrative I've seen is to increase public investment in research and development directly. Can't Freedom Democrats do better?

Any thoughts?