Brooks' five point plan for "positive government" as he calls it is not very conservative (by any traditional defintion) at all. In his view, we need to capture the spirit of reforms like the Morrill Act (which established land-grant colleges in the early 1860s).
There's so much to go after here, but look at the first point of the Brooks Five Point plan:
"A new working class tax credit applied against the payroll tax would reduce some of the stress. So would a larger child tax credit and increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit. The federal budget should bestow less on seniors and more on young families.
Since when does expanding tax credits that largely go to people who don't pay taxes (EITC) spur economic growth? It doesn't. Bush's tax cuts were successful because they were across the board, but also targeted towards driving investment (cap. gains and dividend tax cuts).The rest of Brooks' article reads like the Big Government Republicanism (excuse me..."Positive Government") we've come to know from the Bush administration. At what point did smaller government, pro-growth and non-collectivist policies become a bad thing to Brooks? Maybe they always were.
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