A Fear Of Breaking “The Pledge”: Are Republicans And The Tea Party Serious?
This is not the Congress where I worked in the ’70s and ’80s. This is not the same caliber of leader, especially on the Republican side, that our country has been accustomed to over decades. In the past, people like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann were marginalized. They were not respected by their own party, let alone rewarded; they were relegated to the back bench.
It would have been a joke if someone predicted that a cable queen like Bachmann could raise $14 million for a House race or that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson could raise over $2 million in a matter of weeks as an obscure member, after screaming at the president, “You lie!” at a State of the Union address. The notion that someone such as Bachmann would be so popular in polls and be in a position to win Iowa would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.
But more important than these personalities and their extreme positions is what they have done to the Republican party.
We have a unique opportunity to truly turn this nation around. President Obama, and it appears Speaker of the House John Boehner, were ready to truly change the direction of the country. In the past, I believe we could have made it work—with a Reagan, an O’Neill, a Mansfield, a Baker, a Dirksen. It is a long list.
But, sadly, the absolutism of no revenues—every tax cut, even temporary—is now permanent. Taxes can only go down… sort of like housing prices can only go up! Pledges to Grover Norquist are absurd, shortsighted, and counterproductive.
I truly wonder whether the extreme wing of the Republican Party wants to solve our problem or just play politics with it; is this just beat Obama and the democrats at all costs, the country be damned? Or is it an adherence to an ideology that is inflexible, a fear of breaking some “pledge?”
Regardless, the over $4 trillion budget fix is achievable—not popular—but achievable. It takes both parties to accept political responsibility. I wonder, though, if you asked a Tea Party member or a liberal democrat, “Would you sacrifice your seat in Congress to achieve real fiscal responsibility, to turn the nation around?” would they say “yes?” After all, why did they run for office in the first place? To be serious, to accomplish big things, I would hope.
A number of years ago a group of us were with Sen. Paul Sarbanes. He was retiring after a long and distinguished career in the House and Senate. One person asked him what was the biggest change he had seen in his 40 years. Sarbanes said that people come into office now with their minds made up; they are afraid to change or to listen to the other side. He pointed out that when he first came to the Senate, there used to be real debate on the issues of our time and that minds would be changed. There was a different spirit of cooperation and compromise and true listening. Relationships across the aisle were forged. There was give and take. There was an opportunity to come to an agreement without a total win-lose mentality.
If there ever was a time in our nation’s history to return to that spirit, it is now.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
How Can Anyone Take The GOP Seriously: The Dismal Republican Record On Taxes
“In the present weak economic climate,” a group of conservatives, including Newt Gingrich, wrote in an open statement, “we believe that to restore the health of the economy and put Americans back to work, America should follow a course against high taxes and federal spending.”
The White House was unmoved. “Republicans may feel they can’t go to voters after supporting a tax increase,” one administration official told the New York Times. “We’ve got to convince them that the situation won’t be as devastating as it would be if the tax bill is sabotaged.”
The latest moves in the debt ceiling debate? Not quite: The administration was Ronald Reagan’s, and the year was 1982. With his previous year’s landmark tax cuts having exploded the budget deficit, Reagan had reluctantly backed a tax increase to bring it back under control, prompting a minor conservative uprising led by then Rep. Jack Kemp and which included then backbench House member Gingrich. “You can’t have the largest tax cut in history and then turn around and have the largest tax increase in history,” one conservative rebel groused.
Right-wing economists issued dire forecasts. Arthur Laffer, widely described as the father of supply-side economics, warned that the bill would “stifle economic recovery” and “lengthen and deepen the recession.” The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote that the tax hike would “curb the economic recovery everyone wants,” adding: “It will mean a lower cash flow as more businesses pay more taxes, with a depressing effect on stock prices. It will reduce incentives for the increased savings and investment so badly needed to improve productivity and create more jobs.” As Bruce Bartlett, an early supply-sider and Reagan aide who has since recanted the faith, noted last month, “It would be hard to find an economic forecast that was more wrong in every respect.” Real gross domestic product grew at 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984, while unemployment fell from 10.6 percent in December 1982 to 7.1 percent in 1984.
Just about the only thing the conservative rebels got right back in 1982 was Gingrich’s comment to the New York Times that the skirmish was the “opening round of a fight over the soul and future of the Republican Party.” Looking back, the extent to which the conservatives won the fight within the party while losing the war with economic reality is fairly astounding. In the nearly three decades since, the Republican feeling toward tax increases has moved from Reaganesque dislike but acceptance (he signed tax increases into law in seven of his eight years in office) to their current, blindly absolutist position flatly opposing any tax increases at all, even in the face of spiraling deficits and possible economic default.
Witness comments like House Speaker John Boehner’s that “raising taxes is going to destroy jobs.” The rhetoric hasn’t changed much since 1982, but the accumulated evidence against this GOP dogma is overwhelming.
Gingrich was again at the forefront of the fight against taxes in 1993 when he warned that the Clinton budget plan “will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession.” Rep. Dick Armey, who would go on to be House majority leader and now is a Tea Party godfather, warned that “the impact on job creation is going to be devastating.” Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm warned that the budget deal was a “one-way ticket to a recession,” adding that Clinton’s would be one of the jobs killed by the bill. (Gramm would seek Clinton’s job, but couldn’t best Bob Dole; he was last seen being muzzled by John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008 after calling the country a “nation of whiners.”) Laffer warned that “Clinton’s tax bill will do about as much damage to the U.S. economy as could be feasibly done in the current political environment.” Boehner himself dismissed the Clinton plan as “Christmas in August for liberal Democrats: more taxes, more spending, and bigger government.”
He got the Christmas part right. Unemployment, which had been 7.1 percent in January 1993, fell to 5.4 percent by the end of 1994. Real GDP grew from 2.9 percent in 1993 to 4.1 percent in 1994. The final tally of the Clinton years was 23 million new jobs and a budget surplus.
Clinton and his villainous tax hikes were followed by George W. Bush and his cure-all tax cuts. “Tax relief will create new jobs,” Bush argued in April 2001. “Tax relief will generate new wealth.” When the bill was enacted that June, GOP Rep. Mike Pence (now running for governor of Indiana) gushed that they would “stimulate our economy” and “put the ax to the root of the Internal Revenue Code as it wages war on the American dream.”
How’d that turn out? From 2001 to 2007, jobs grew at one fifth the pace of the 1990s, the slowest rate in the post-World War II era. GDP in those years grew at half the rate of the 1990s. Oh yeah, and the deficit exploded. Fully 10 years after the largest tax cuts in history, the economy had shed 1.1 million jobs. It seems Pence’s ax was put to the root of the American dream itself.
Given the historical and economic record, one has to ask: How can anyone take the GOP seriously, especially when they are playing fast and loose with economic disaster in service to a political philosophy that not even their main icon—Reagan—followed with such monomania?
Decrying the Clinton tax plan in 1993, Boehner recalled the quote: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” He went on, “It very appropriately applies to Congress today.” That’s one piece of rhetoric Boehner really should recycle. And learn from.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
Ideology Trumps Economics: Republicans’ Refusal To Raise Revenues Is Threatening The Economy With A Chaotic Default
There is a huge gap in logic at the heart of the Republican intransigence on a debt-ceiling deal, and President Obama helped to illuminate it on Monday.
The party claims, as an article of faith, if not evidence, that the government’s growing debt is the reason for persistent unemployment and economic stagnation. And yet Republicans are spurning the president’s compromise offers to reduce that debt by trillions over the next decade because he is sensibly insisting that any deal include some increase in tax revenue.
“Where are they?” Mr. Obama asked at his news conference. “I mean, this is what they claim would be the single biggest boost to business certainty and confidence. So what’s the holdup?”
The holdup, of course, is that Republicans are far more committed to the ideological goals of cutting government and taxes than they are committed to cutting the deficit. They rejected several compromise offers by the White House, even though any revenue increases would be far outweighed by spending cuts.
Republican rejectionism was on clear display Saturday night when John Boehner, the House speaker, was forced to abandon a plan he and the president had discussed to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.
The plan would have gone much too far in cutting discretionary spending and entitlements, taking too much money from the economy at a time when it desperately needs government investment. But it would have been better than the slashing and burning the Republicans have been demanding because it would have raised from $700 billion to $1 trillion in additional revenue beginning in 2013 by ending tax breaks and deductions for corporations and the rich, or by ending the Bush tax cuts for families making $250,000 or more.
The House Republican leader, Eric Cantor, insisted to Mr. Boehner that his members, shackled to antitax pledges, could not accept it, or anything similar. Now negotiators are trying to reach agreement on a deal to lower the deficit by $2 trillion or so over a decade. But the consequences for the economy and Americans’ lives would be just as disastrous if all of those “savings” come out of essential government programs, with no additional revenue.
Mr. Boehner’s refusal to push back against his party’s ideologues is only feeding their worst impulses. Many House Republicans have gone even further than Mr. Cantor and have rejected any deal that raises the debt ceiling, whether it contains revenue increases or not.
Representative Michele Bachmann and Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, airily and irresponsibly insist that the government will find some other way to pay its bills. That’s dangerous nonsense. And as the president forcefully noted, a default could propel interest rates skyward, throw millions more Americans out of work, and create another recession.
It was good to see Mr. Obama challenging the Republicans’ illogic and pushing them to make a deal before it’s too late. But we fear the sort of deal he is willing to consider, based overwhelmingly on spending cuts, could still consign the country to more years of economic stagnation.
The president spoke about the need to create an infrastructure bank, to maintain unemployment benefits, and to protect the elderly and the poor. But keeping those goals will be nearly impossible with a debt deal that cuts three times as much spending as it raises revenue. A balanced plan, like the one Senator Kent Conrad is circulating among Senate Democrats, would cut spending and raise revenue equally, and would make it possible to pay for programs that kick-start the economy.
Americans need to hear the hard economic truth that there is no way to both cut the deficit and revive the economy without finding additional sources of revenue. As the president himself said on Monday, “If not now, when?”
By: Editorial, The New York Times, July 11, 2011
Economic Illiteracy: GOP Catering To Tea Party Ignorance On Debt Ceiling
What happens when you take the certainty of an ideologue, mix in an unhealthy dose of economic illiteracy, shameless demagoguery, and bring the combustible mix to a boil on the national stage? Quite possibly national default and a new recession.
The nature of this mix—and the corner into which GOP leaders have painted themselves—is neatly illustrated in the latest poll numbers from The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center.
As the Post’s Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake note today:
The data suggests that those who identify as Republicans who are supportive of the tea party not only view themselves as far more educated than the average person on the current debt debate, but are also far more worried about the impact if the debt limit is increased.
More than eight in 10 tea party supporters (81 percent) said they understand “what would happen if the government does not raise the federal debt limit” — far more than the 55 percent of all respondents who said the same thing.
Three quarters of tea party supporters said that they were more concerned that raising the debt ceiling would “lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger,” while just 19 percent said they were more worried that “not raising the debt limit would force the government into default and hurt the nation’s economy.”
…
The message from the numbers? Tea party backers simply don’t believe that not raising the debt limit by Aug. 2 is all that big a deal — and they feel that way because they believe they understand the issue inside and out.
…
If a significant chunk of his House members don’t fear the consequences of a default, it’s very difficult for Boehner to make the case for the fierce urgency of now in the debt debate.
While the overwhelming number of economists—and even prominent non-economists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who have both stated that not raising the debt ceiling is unthinkable—say that failure to raise the debt ceiling could have a host of nasty consequences for the economy, like a global financial crisis, downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, and a second recession … the Tea Party crowd has anointed itself a group of experts who know better.
This is why Eric Cantor could with a (presumably) straight face argue yesterday that the GOP’s great concession in this debate was considering a debt ceiling increase at all. But sorry, our base is too wound up in its own misconceptions to allow us to do the slam dunk right thing for the county is the politics of cowardice. And it’s a brand that Cantor, who has referred to the debt ceiling crisis as a “leverage moment”—an opportunity for the GOP to extract concessions in order to be forced to do the right thing—has played with either cold cynicism or reckless stupidity.
Then there’s Boehner, who acknowledges the debt ceiling must be raised but cloaks it in the language of Obama getting “his” rise in the debt ceiling—as if keeping the country from an economic disaster is some parochial, partisan, hobby.
No less a publication than The Economist, hardly a hotbed of socialist foment, recently called the GOP position “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.” I think that’s about right.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 12, 2011
A False Equivalency: Don’t Blame ‘Both Sides’ For Debt Impasse
Washington has many lazy habits, and one of the worst is a reflexive tendency to see equivalence where none exists. Hence the nonsense, being peddled by politicians and commentators who should know better, that “both sides” are equally at fault in the deadlocked talks over the debt ceiling.
This is patently false. The truth is that Democrats have made clear they are open to a compromise deal on budget cuts and revenue increases. Republicans have made clear they are not.
Put another way, Democrats reacted to the “grand bargain” proposed by President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner by squawking, complaining and highlighting elements they didn’t like. This is known throughout the world as the way to begin a process of negotiation.
Republicans, by contrast, answered with a definitive “no” and then covered their ears. Given the looming Aug. 2 deadline for default if the debt ceiling is not raised, the proper term for this approach is blackmail.
Yet the “both sides are to blame” narrative somehow gained currency after Boehner announced Saturday that House Republicans would not support any increase in revenue, period. A false equivalence was drawn between the absolute Republican rejection of “revenue-positive” tax reform and the less-than-absolute Democratic opposition to “benefit cuts” in Medicare and Social Security.
The bogus story line is that the radical right-wing base of the GOP and the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party are equally to blame for sinking the deal.
Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that in the Obama-Boehner proposal, there would be roughly three dollars’ worth of budget cuts for every dollar of new revenue. Don’t pause to ask whether it makes sense to slash government spending when the economy is still sputtering out of the worst recession in decades. Instead, focus narrowly on the politics of the deal.
It is true that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi howled like a blindsided politician when she learned that entitlement programs were on the table. But her objections — and those of Democrats in general — are philosophical and tactical, not absolute.
Progressives understand that Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable on their current trajectories; in the long term, both must have their revenue and costs brought into balance. Pelosi’s position is that each program should be addressed with an eye toward sustainability — not as a part of a last-minute deal for a hike in the debt ceiling that covers us for two or three years.
It’s also true that Democrats believe they can win back a passel of House seats next year by highlighting the GOP plan to convert Medicare into a voucher program. They don’t want Republicans to be able to point and say, “See, the Democrats want to cut Medicare, too.”
There’s nothing in these Democratic objections, however, that couldn’t be creatively finessed. You can claim you haven’t actually “cut” a benefit, for example, if what you’ve done is restrained the rate at which its cost will grow. You can offset spending with new revenue, and you can do so in a way that gives low-income taxpayers a break. Democrats left the door open and these options could have been explored.
The story on the Republican side is entirely different. There are ways to finesse a “no new taxes” pledge, too. Instead of raising tax rates, you close loopholes in the name of reform; you add an enhancement here, a “user fee” there, and you can manage to get the revenue you need and still claim you haven’t voted to raise taxes.
But Republicans are taking the position that not a cent of new revenue can be raised, no matter the euphemism. Some Democrats, yes, are being scratchy and cantankerous. But Republicans are refusing to negotiate at all. That’s not the same thing.
I understand why President Obama, in his news conference Monday, chided “each side” for taking a “maximalist position.” For political and practical reasons, it’s advantageous for him to be seen as an honest broker.
Meanwhile, though, the clock ticks toward Aug. 2 and the possibility of a catastrophic default becomes more real. And no one should be confused about what the president confronts: On one side, grousing and grumbling. On the other, a brick wall.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 11, 2011
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