Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), flanked by Sens. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) recent one-man stand against legislation extending unemployment benefits offered a high-profile airing of a popular GOP message: Deficit spending, in almost any form, will cause more harm than good to a fragile economy.

Standing in the way of the Republicans’ reasoning, however, has been another formidable group: budget experts. Most are urging additional, though temporary, deficit spending as the surest way to tackle the jobs crisis and prevent the economy from slipping back into recession. It hasn’t helped the GOP’s argument that a good number of them are fiscal conservatives.

[Congress1] Few observers, for example, would accuse David M. Walker of being a liberal spendthrift. Indeed, the former U.S. comptroller general has spent most of the last decade forging a personal crusade against deficit spending. Yet last week — on the same day that Bunning, a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher known more for his curveball than his economic insights, initiated his drive against fiscal imprudence — Walker wrote in Politico that “a focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead.”

“A huge recession can yield a huge deficit,” Walker, now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates for balanced budgets, wrote in an op-ed co-authored by Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Though a concern, most of the recent short-term rise in the deficit is understandable. Furthermore, public spending can help compensate for the fall in private spending, and help stem the pain of substantial job losses.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, agrees. Zandi, an adviser to Sen. John McCain during the Arizona Republican’s 2008 run at the White House, has urged lawmakers in recent weeks “to be aggressive” in tackling the continuing jobs crisis, which has left nearly a fifth of the nation’s working population without a job or underemployed.

“If we have another recession, we will have no policy response,” Zandi told a House panel last week. “We have to err on the side of doing too much.”

The message from the experts is clear: If you think adding $10 billion to the deficit is dangerous to future economic growth, wait ‘til you see what happens when millions of unemployed folks, denied access to a government safety net, slash their consumption (at best) and foreclose on their homes (at worst).

No matter. On the issue of deficit spending to address the hovering downturn, Republican leaders in both chambers are all but united in opposition, as is much of their caucus. Thirty Republicans, for example, voted to block the Democrats’ $15 billion jobs package that passed the upper-chamber last week. More recently, 39 Republicans voted with Bunning against the Democrats’ plan to tap deficit spending to pay for a $10 billion temporary extension of COBRA benefits, funding for doctors who treat Medicare patients, federal highway programs and the filing deadline for unemployment insurance.

“If we can’t find $10 billion to pay for something that we all support, we will never pay for anything on the floor of this U.S. Senate,” Bunning said during his five-day stalling marathon. “We cannot keep adding to the debt.”

At issue is the distinction — many would say a failure to distinguish — between the long-term structural problems at the heart of the nation’s unsustainable spending curve, and the temporary measures the government has put in place in the past two years to address the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Government Accountability Office summarized the long-term budget crisis Tuesday, issuing a report indicating what experts know too well: Federal spending threatens to swamp the nation’s economy, and the entitlement programs — particularly Medicare and Medicaid, which run on autopilot — are the predominant driving force, not recent stimulus measures.

“By 2030,” GAO warned, “there will be little room for ‘all other spending,’ which consists of what many think of as ‘government,’ including national defense, homeland security, investment in highways and mass transit and alternative energy sources.”

Walker and Mishel also stressed the importance of differentiating between short-term emergency spending and statutory obligations. The former, they argue, “and the resulting short-term deficits they cause, should not be confused with the primary deficit challenge facing our nation: structural deficits. These deficits are projected to exist in coming years — even when the country is at peace, even when the economy is growing, even when unemployment falls.”

Ironically for this debate, the legislation causing much greater strain than stimulus bills on the the country’s fiscal health are measures passed under the Bush administration with the blessing of GOP leaders in Congress. The Bush tax cuts, for example — if extended this year, as expected — stand to whisk hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal coffers over the next decade. And the Medicare prescription drug benefit — an unfunded entitlement expansion that Republicans rammed through Congress in 2003 — is estimated to add $550 billion to the debt by 2017.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and former advisor to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), hasn’t overlooked the hypocrisy coming from GOP leaders who suddenly want to be recognized as champions of fiscal restraint.

“It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term,” Bartlett wrote in Forbes recently. “As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt.”

It hasn’t stopped Bunning. The Kentucky Republican, who voted for the drug benefit, warned Democrats that he plans to play fiscal monitor as the majority party moves ahead this month with its job-creating agenda.

“I’ll be watching them closely,” he said Tuesday, “and checking off the hypocrites one by one.”

The ship has sailed on a possible Sanford resignation, but stories like these make it clear that Sanford, whom many economic conservatives considered a strong possible presidential candidate in 2012, would have been felled by the scrutiny into his habits. You can’t run as an economic conservative while explaining away a thousand-dollar haircut. What would Mike Huckabee have said?

TWI: Do you worry that your work at CPR could be seen as you nursing a grudge for what happened with Columbia/HCA?

RICK SCOTT: There’s no grudge. First off, if you go back and look at what we accomplished at Columbia/HCA, it was the lowest prices and best outcomes. I left and nothing happened to me. I can’t do anything about what people want to complain about. But if you look at what we’re doing, we’re doing the right things.

TWI: What, specifically?

RICK SCOTT: If you go look at Solantic [which Scott co-founded in 2001], we have transparency on prices, we’re dramatically less expensive than everyone else and we have a great service. Or go back and look at Columbia, look at all the objective measures. Go look at joint commission, accommodation, at accreditation. If you look at the top 100 hospitals, we started with less than seven percent of them. My last year, we had 27 percent of those hospitals. If you look at my management team, all of my management team went on and ran hospital companies.

TWI: People can still say, “Look, this was the guy who resigned in the biggest fraud settlement in American history.”

RICK SCOTT: But, you know, we were the biggest company. If you go back and look at the hospital industry, and the whole health care industry since the mid-1990s, it was basically constantly going through investigations. Great institutions, like ours, paid fines. It was too bad.

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McCain then sought to define Palin by her reformer bona-fides, including the time she unseated the incumbent Republican governor and when she resigned from a state energy board over her disgust with a member’s ethical lapses.

But then McCain headed into muddy territory, where he made a number of errors on Alaska and Palin’s overall record. I’ll break down the paragraph in question line-by-line.

She’s given money back to the taxpayers.

Alaska doesn’t tend to talk about the public as “taxpayers.” The reason is that there is no state income tax or property tax here. Alaska is run by taxing the companies that tap the state’s rich natural resources, mainly oil companies. To say she gave back “taxpayer” money isn’t entirely accurate. Alaskans received a $1,200 check this year to offset the high cost of energy, which coincided with huge state revenues because of high oil prices. This check was in addition to $2,000 that every Alaskan received this year as part of the state’s Permanent Fund Dividend program that shares oil profits with residents.

She’s cut the size of government.

Palin actually increased government spending in Alaska by about 28 percent this year, according to The Associated Press. Her $11-billion budget spends about $16,000 per person in the state.

She negotiated with the oil companies and faced them down, a $40 billion pipeline of natural gas that’s going to relieve the energy needs of the United — of what they call the lower 48.

It’s true that Palin has agreed to subsidize the company, TransCanada, with a half-billion dollars in public money to explore a possible natural gas pipeline. But that doesn’t mean any dirt will be turned for years – if at all.

McCain wrapped up talking about Palin by noting that she understands the challenges of families with children with special needs, including autism. This was a bit of a surprise, as the Palins have a 5-month-old baby boy, Trig, with Down syndrome. The Anchorage Daily News reports that she does have a nephew with autism, which she noted during her 2006 gubernatorial campaign.

One thing McCain left out of his points on Palin was the story that’s put her in the headlines up here lately — Troopergate.

But that was never in doubt, and it’s not the issue here: Of course Wasilla (pop. 5,400 in 2000) couldn’t afford the millions to pave its airport; and of course there’s nothing inherently dishonest or villainous about tapping Washington to make up the difference.

This money came, as some have been quick to distinguish — and as I should have made clear earlier — from FAA and DOT grants, which, though they require congressional approval during the appropriations process, don’t target specific projects.

That being said, Palin’s alacrity to grab federal dollars, from any perch, remains significant in the context of a race in which she’s trying to paint herself as a maverick fiscal conservative who never needed to call on federal taxpayers for a dime.

In her speech Wednesday night, that message couldn’t have been clearer: “I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere,” she proclaimed. “If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”

Nevermind, for a minute, that she initially supported that bridge. As the Anchorage Daily News reported on Oct. 5, 2006, Palin said during a gubernatorial debate: “I do support the infrastructure projects that are on tap here in the state of Alaska that our congressional delegations worked hard for.”

Her newfound message of anti-Washington independence flies right in the face of her first-hand knowledge that small communities can’t live without a reliance on Washington. So why not just come out and say it? (This is a rhetorical question. Most conservatives, even in the wake of the Bush administration, have somehow retained the delusion that they represent small-government self-reliance — this even as red states continue to suck more federal dollars than they return to Washington, while blue states tend to bankroll places like Alaska.)

Palin’s previous grant-grabbing is particularly odd in light of what she says she’ll do from the White House. Because more tax cuts for the wealthy, greater military spending and a promise to balance the budget all point to just one thing: fewer federal dollars for places like Wasilla.