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
To Effect Real Change: Retake State Legislatures
As we ponder whether Obama’s offering to cut Social Security represents a betrayal of Democratic values, whether it’s an as-of-yet-unexplored opening in yet another 11th-dimensional chess match, whether a decrease of an increase is really a cut or not or whether, in the words of Paul Krugman, the president is executing an “anti-Corleone” by making the Republicans an offer they can’t accept, Democratic values are being systematically destroyed. But the source of the destruction isn’t coming from Washington; instead, it is happening state by state.
The lion’s share of coverage has appropriately focused on the unrelenting extremism of Speaker Boehner’s House majority, but the gains Republicans made in our nation’s statehouses have been no less devastating. In 2010, the GOP made historic gains rivaled only by the wave in 1994. There are now 26 states where Republicans control both legislative chambers; Republicans also occupy the governor’s mansion in 21 of those, compared to 15 and 11 respectively for Democrats. Not coincidentally, 26 states enacted further restrictions on abortion rights. Some of them are particularly odious, such as Louisiana’s measure that would deny malpractice insurance coverage to doctors performing abortions, or a now-blocked law in Kansas that would impose a series of unnecessary licensing restrictions that would have resulted in the closure of two of the three clinics in the state.
At an economic level, the Republican legislators of Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan are proceeding toward accomplishing at a state level longstanding objectives that they could never realistically accomplish at a federal one: specifically, achieving unilateral political disarmament by hamstringing a key funding source of Democratic campaign funding, or selling off public assets without any bidding process to whichever crony they deem appropriate. In Minnesota, Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives, and won control of the State Senate for the first time in history. The result? A government shutdown that is costing the state and its hardworking public employees just so the richest two percent of Minnesotans don’t have to contribute their fair share to help the state function.
Not that states with Republican-dominated legislatures are the only ones with problems. In California, Republicans dominate the budgetary aspects of the legislature despite having only about 35 percent of the seats in either chamber because of Proposition 13, the absurd rule that a two-thirds vote in each chamber must be required to raise revenues. Because it is as impossible to secure a sane legislative Republican in Sacramento as it is in Washington, California’s budget has been consigned for many years to be a series of ever-deeper cuts to the social safety net, public education, and the state park system.
This is a redistricting cycle, and the change in state lines could change some of these equations, but right now, the number of victories required to stop the damage, if not reverse it, is comparatively small. In California, a takeover of two seats in Assembly and Senate would be enough to prevent the Republican minority from continuing to hold the state hostage during every budget negotiation. In Wisconsin, a net gain of three Senate seats from the nine recall elections on Aug. 9 would stop Gov. Scott Walker from destroying Wisconsin any more than he already has. Retaking the lower chambers in Michigan and Ohio would be a slightly more difficult task, but no less achievable given previous history.
A child in an overcrowded classroom in Los Angeles. A Madison teacher fighting for her economic rights. A maintenance worker in Detroit. A scared, pregnant teenager in Orlando who will soon be required to notify her parents if she wants to exercise her rights. They are all being affected far more by what their state governments are trying to do to them, or cannot do for them, than by anything that Speaker Boehner has done since January.
This isn’t to say that retaking the House, re-electing Barack Obama and holding onto our Senate majority is not important. It most certainly is. But a Democratic Congress would not have stopped these state-level Republicans from attempting to enact their sweeping, destructive agenda. The only way to stop them is to raise enough money and awareness so as to defeat them and undo the massive damage that they have managed to accomplish in only six months of governance. Retaking the Wisconsin Senate on Aug. 9 will be a significant victory, but it must be viewed not as an endgame, but as an important first step in a much larger campaign.
By: Dante Atkins, Daily Kos, July 10, 2011
“The Marriage Vow”: The Candidate “Pledge” To End All Pledges
So in the wake of the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” signed by seven Republican presidential candidates, and the “Pro-Life Presidential Pledge” signed by five, along comes Iowa social conservative kingpin Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization with a new pledge–actually an oath–it calls “The Marriage Vow.”
You have to read this document to believe it. Styled as a “pro-family” platform, the pledge goes far beyond the usual condemnations of same-sex marriage and abortion and requires support for restrictions on divorce (hardly a federal matter), the firing of military officers who place women in forward combat roles, and “recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, [and] greater financial stability.” If that’s not enough, it also enjoins “recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.” This, in case you are wondering, is a nod to the “Full Quiver (or Quiverfull) Movement” that encourages large families in a patriarchal structure as a religious obligation, not to mention to those anti-choicers who want to ban some of the most popular forms of contraception.
The preamble to the “Marriage Vow” is even weirder, asserting among other things that “faithful monogomy” was a central preoccupation of the Founding Fathers; that slaves benefitted from stronger families than African-Americans have today; and that any claims there is a genetic basis for homosexuality are “anti-scientific.”
The “Marriage Vow” seems tailor-made to feed the backlash against ever-proliferating “pledges” imposed on Republican presidential candidates by the Right. But Vander Plaats and his group cannot be dissed without risk by anyone wanting to win the Iowa Caucuses. A perennial statewide candidate (his 2010 primary challenge to now-Gov. Terry Branstad won a surprising 41% of the vote), Vander Plaats was co-chair of Mike Huckabee’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign, and also spearheaded the successful 2010 effort to recall state Supreme Court judges who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Kevin Hall of The Iowa Republican suggests that the “Vow” is a power-play by VanderPlaats to influence the outcome of the August 13 Iowa State GOP straw poll, in which The Family Leader has pledged neutrality, by separating candidates deemed acceptable from those who won’t sign the oath. And indeed, Michele Bachmann, rumored to be Vander Plaats’ current favorite, signed it virtually before the ink dried. What will really be interesting is whether Tim Pawlenty, who has been eagerly accepting every ideological demand made of him by the Right, signs this document. It is certainly designed to freak out the more secular-minded Establishment Republicans he will eventually need if he is to put together a winning coalition of everyone in the party who doesn’t like Mitt Romney. But he has to do well in Iowa for that to matter, so my guess is that he will follow Bachmann in kissing Vander Plaats’ ring and associating himself with a fresh batch of extremism.
By: Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist, July 8, 2011
Leader Of A Cadre Of Children: It Sucks To Be John Boehner
Mea culpa.
I confess that I have often picked on, made fun of, and generally disparaged Speaker of the House John Boehner only to now find myself feeling a measure of remorse for having done so.
It turns out that Speaker Boehner may be the only semi-reasonable man left in the Republican Party.
Yes, I know that Boehner has himself to blame for the role he played in opening the doors of Congress to the unyielding and unreasonable Members swept into office by the Tea Party rebellion in 2010. Yes, Boehner has spent far too many years cozying up to Wall Street and protecting the interests of big business at the expense of the middle class.
And just in case you’re wondering, I have not forgotten that John Boehner has long been quick to condemn the White House for the jobs crisis while doing absolutely nothing to assist in creating policy that would help solve the problem. Boehner has been a continuing impediment to growing American jobs by working with Obama on infrastructure legislation or any other valuable stimulus that could make a big difference for the many who are suffering from extended unemployment.
Still, you have to admit that it sucks to be John Boehner.
Imagine if you had to make decisions regarding the successful operation of your own home and your three year old, five year old and two year old each had a full vote in the decisions that are ultimately taken.
Say it’s time to buy the new family car. The two eldest of the three kids decide that the only sensible vehicle to purchase would be an ice cream truck filled to the top with Good Humor ice cream bars and, as an added option, comes with the happy song that streams from the scratchy PA system perched on the roof.
From the point of view of children of such an age, this choice makes total sense.
Yet, when the grown-ups must point out that such a purchase would neither be practical nor in the best interest of the family and cast their votes for a new, American made family minivan, it is left to the two year old to break the tie.
That can’t be good.
Welcome to John Boehner’s world – a world where he is the leader of a cadre of children who have yet to mature to the point where they warrant election to the post of school hall monitor let alone the halls of Congress.
As David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column earlier this week complaining about the GOP’s inability to just say yes to a good deal on the deficit-
That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.” Via New York Times
I don’t know about your experience, but what Brooks describes sounds an awful lot like my own kids before they were old enough to reason and make adult decisions.
If these immature Members of Congress were not enough of a problem for an old school deal maker like Boehner, the Speaker has to contend with a scheming GOP Majority Leader in Eric Cantor who waits behind every door with a dagger aimed squarely at his boss’s heart.
I wouldn’t bet against Cantor’s ultimate success in playing Brutus to Boehner’s Caesar as the Speaker remains caught between a Ba-rack and a Tea Party with nowhere to turn to get out of the mess.
Speaker Boehner knows the debt ceiling must be raised and has been willing to publicly say so as recently as this morning. He also knows that Congress must take great care to do nothing to further stifle the struggling economy just as he realizes all too well that he will need Democratic votes to get whatever deal he cuts with the President through the House as he won’t be able to count on his own Members.
This leaves Boehner to walk an impossible line between doing what he believes is necessary for the nation he is charged with governing and those who would ride the country into the ground in order to protect wealthy industries from losing a few unnecessary tax subsidies or, even worse, support keeping the economy mired in quicksand in order to better evict Barack Obama from the White House.
E.J. Dionne summed it up this way –
I’d actually feel bad for Boehner — an old-fashioned sort who’d normally reach for a deal — if he and his party had not shamelessly stoked the Tea Party to win power. The GOP is now reaping the whirlwind, and Boehner may be forced to choose between his country and his job. Via Washington Post
Unlike Dionne, I actually do feel badly for Boehner as he tries to make a deal and still hold onto his job. And I will feel more than badly for the entire nation should we find ourselves with Eric Cantor sitting in the seat of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Whether you sympathize with the man or, like Dionne, believes he is just getting what’s coming to him, you have to to agree on one thing –
It truly does suck to be John Boehner.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, July 8, 2011
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