Democratic Leadership Council To Democratic Candidates: "Don't Forget To Cut Some Spending"

The moderate-liberal group warns Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama to commit to fiscal discipline in their presidential bids. Paul Weinstein Jr., a senior fellow at the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute who teaches public policy at Johns Hopkins University, and Marc Dunkelman, the DLC's vice president for strategic communications, argue that either the Democratic presidential candidates will have to propose some spending cuts if they want to take advantage of President George W. Bush's record of deficit spending. "They have to offer some really specific proposals on spending to pass the smell test," said Mr. Weinstein said. "That would give them some credibility, and voters would not be so easily scared that they're just interested in raising taxes." If Democrats don't establish their bona fides on reining in spending and "demanding that the federal government live within its means," Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Dunkelman suggested, then they'll continue to be vulnerable to GOP charges that they're tax-and-spenders.

However, as Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton drum up support among Democrats in Pennsylvania, neither one has been shy about ringing up new spending or expressing confidence in big-government solutions to economic problems. On Wednesday, Sen. Clinton announced a new 'in-sourcing' agenda to create high-wage jobs in the United States by giving companies $7 billion a year in new tax breaks. On Tuesday, she announced an infrastructure agenda to spur employment that featured a $10 billion emergency fund to repair bridges, tunnels, roads and water systems. Sen. Obama said in a Wednesday speech to a gathering in Philadelphia of Pennsylvania AFL-CIO members that 'it's time Washington started showing the same kind of leadership that Pennsylvania's labor movement has shown by fighting to create the green jobs that are the jobs of the future.' He vowed that if he's elected president, he'll 'invest' $150 billion over 10 years to create 5 million new jobs.

The DLC study offered a number of specific spending steps that the Democrats could take to demonstrate their commitment to fiscal restraint: reducing the number of government contractors by 750,000, curtailing government travel, banning bonuses for political appointees, stopping acquisition of new federal office space, cutting the number of no-bid government contracts and establishing a corporate welfare commission that would reduce tax breaks and subsidies to companies. The study calculated that the total savings over a 10-year period from these steps would be more than $606 billion.