“At Odds With Reality”: Three Conservative Myths About Government
The Path to Prosperity blueprint of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan—the foundation for the budget that the House passed last week—reflects conservative politicians’ war on government. As my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues conclude about a Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, analysis of the Ryan plan:
The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, ‘spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]’ and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending…the rest of government would largely have to disappear.
The conservatives’ war is sustained by a series of myths.
Myth No. 1: Spending Is Out of Control, and Only Draconian Cuts Will Rein It In
As my colleagues at the center have shown, however, noninterest spending outside Social Security and Medicare spiked in the Great Recession but is scheduled to fall substantially as a share of GDP as the economy recovers (see chart).
To be sure, government spending will rise as a share of gross domestic product as the population continues to age, healthcare costs throughout the economy continue to rise, and more Americans become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. But, my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues have written:
When Americans hear talk of the government exploding in size and reach, they don’t usually think this means that more people will receive Social Security and Medicare because the population is growing older or that Medicare will cost more because of factors like the aging of the baby boomers and advances in medical technology that improve health and prolong life but at significant cost. Outside of those demographic and health cost factors, the portrait of a rapidly growing federal behemoth is simply at odds with reality, since costs are shrinking to levels well below their historical averages.
Myth No. 2: The Country Faces a Looming Debt Crisis Due to the Debt Incurred In the Past Few Years
That myth fueled irresponsible brinksmanship over legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit last year, and it stands in the way of meaningful deficit-reduction.
While the policies that Presidents Bush and Obama and Congress enacted to combat the financial crisis and Great Recession helped drive up deficits after 2007, those policies were temporary and will have little effect on deficits and debt going forward. The weak economy and the legacy other policies enacted under President Bush (especially his tax cuts) play a far larger role. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office calculates that under current law (which calls for the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of this year), deficits would fall over the coming decade as the economy improves, and debt would fall to 61.3 percent of GDP in 2022.
Yes, the gap between spending and revenues will rise again as a share of GDP in later decades if we don’t take prudent action to rein in future deficits. Policymakers and analysts who are not ideologically committed to radically shrinking government recognize that this will require a balanced mix of revenue and spending measures. But such a balanced policy runs up against myriad tax myths, including the following:
Myth No. 3: Americans’ Tax Burden Is High and Rising
That’s certainly the impression the Tax Foundation wants to convey in its latest “Tax Freedom Day” report released earlier this week: “Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2% federal, state, and local tax bill. ”
But notice, the report does not refer to “every” American or the “typical” American. That’s because, as this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report demonstrates, four out of five U.S. households likely pay a much lower average tax rate than the one highlighted in the Tax Foundation report. Moreover, average federal income rates are at historic lows for typical taxpayers. When total taxes, including federal and state and local taxes, are taken into account, the United States has one of the lowest average tax rates among all industrialized countries.
So, here’s the question:
Are those who advance these myths interested in fixing the deficit and debt problem, as most Americans would hope, or are they conducting a bait-and-switch in pursuit of antitax advocate Grover Norquist’s quest to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub?”
By: Chad Stone, Chief Economist at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
“Black-Robed Partisans”: More Outbursts Of Republican Wingnuttery On The Federal Bench
I’m sure you’ve probably heard about this by now, but it’s a pretty remarkable story: a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge with the silent acquiescence of two colleague on a three-judge panel dealing with a secondary challenge to the constititutionality of the Affordable Care Act freaked out yesterday and demanded that the Department of Justice file an immediate statement repudiating what the judge chose to interpret as the president’s defiance of the power of judicial review. Here is CBS’ Jan Crawford’s updated report after reviewing audio of the incident:
In the hearing, Judge [Jerry] Smith says the president’s comments suggesting courts lack power to set aside federal laws “have troubled a number of people” and that the suggestion “is not a small matter.”
The bottom line from Smith: A three-page letter with specifics. He asked DOJ to discuss “judicial review, as it relates to the specific statements of the president, in regard to Obamacare and to the authority of the federal courts to review that legislation.”
“I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday — that’s about 48 hours from now — a letter stating what is the position of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president,” Smith said. “What is the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review?”
Smith made his intentions clear minutes after the DOJ attorney began her argument, jumping in to ask: “Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?”
Kaersvang replies yes, and Smith continues: “I’m referring to statements by the president in past few days to the effect, and sure you’ve heard about them, that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed ‘unelected’ judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed — he was referring to, of course, Obamacare — to what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.”
In asking for the letter, Smith said: “I want to be sure you’re telling us that the attorney general and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts, through unelected judges, to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.”
Smith, who got his lifetime appointment from Ronald Reagan, is a conservative judge on a famously conservative circuit, notes ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser:
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit may be the most ideological court in the country. When the oil industry’s allies in Congress wanted to protect the industry from drilling lawsuits, they passed a bill trying to force those lawsuits into the reliably industry-friendly Fifth Circuit. When a high school cheerleader sued her school district after it made her cheer for her alleged rapist, the Fifth Circuit ordered the alleged rape victim to pay more than $40,000. When one of the court’s few progressives asked a series of probing questions to a prosecutor during a court hearing, Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Edith Jones yelled at him to “shut up” and asked him if he would like to leave the courtroom.
But Smith’s outburst of wingnuttery was pretty remarkable even by those standards. Orrin Kerr, a contributor to the generally conservative Volokh Conspiracy legal blog, initially called Smith’s gesture “extraordinarily embarassing to the federal judiciary,” and after listening to the audio backed down on that statement only to a small extent:
[T]he tone of the questions was quite different from what I was expecting based on the story. It came off to me as earnest and genuine, not just an effort to score a cheap political point. With that said, the order still strikes me as highly inappropriate: The DOJ lawyer was quite clear as to DOJ’s position, and lower court judges deciding cases based on briefing and argument should not be going outside the record to come up with assignments to litigants based on press releases by politicians in such politically charged matters. It just makes the judges look like political actors themselves, which doesn’t help anyone.
For the most part, though, Smith is enjoying high-fives rather than rebukes from the conservative commentariat. And it’s all a real through-the-looking-glass moment for those of us who remember decades of conservative demonization of the federal courts and the arrogance of “unelected judges” thrwarting the popular will on civil rights, civil liberties, abortion, gay rights, and so on and so forth. Not that very long ago, the late Richard John Neuhaus, considered one of a small handful of the most important conservative thinkers in America, proposed what amounted to a right of revolution against the illegitimate “regime” of federal judges. Not every conservative agreed, but he received a respectful hearing for this extremist position.
But all previous positions, it appears, and all previous standards of appropriate behavior as well, must be abandoned when it comes to the overriding task of opposing Barack Obama. That’s fitting, given that the underlying issue here is Obama’s adoption of the individual health insurance purchasing mandate originally crafted by conservatives.
A lawyer friend of Kevin Drum’s offered him this immediate reaction to the Smith incident:
This is meant to embarrass the President. Full stop. Jesus, this is getting scary. It just seems like all out partisan war brought by the Republicans from all corners of the Government. They want to push it as far as they can. And then further. It’s incredibly destructive.
“They want to push it as far as they can” is a comment applicable to the conservative movement generally in its assault on the conventions of American law and government as generally accepted towards the end of the twentieth century. It’s just a little startling to hear its battle-cries echoed from the federal bench.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 4, 2012
“In No Position To Tout Consistency”: Mitt Romney Half Steps To The GOP Nomination
The former Massachusetts governor responds to President Obama with nothing but weak sauce.
In an election year, political speeches have more in common with hip-hop “diss” tracks then they do with anything else. In which case, President Obama’s speech last night was the “Ether” to the Republican Party’s “Takeover”—an assured, aggressive response that methodically destroyed the GOP’s rationale for its slavish devotion to the rich.
Today, I expected Mitt Romney to hit back with a diss of his own. As the presumptive standard-bearer of the Republican Party, it falls on him to make the party’s case against a second term for Obama. In his speech today before the American Society of News Editors, he tried to hit the president on both his record and the tenor of his campaign. And in fairness to the former Massachusetts governor, he makes a few well-placed swipes—it is true that the administration has yet to release a budget, and it is true that Obama has abruptly changed pace on energy issues, accommodating the oil and gas industry in a way that wasn’t true last year.
With that aside, however, the speech fell completely flat. But this had nothing to do with Romney’s delivery—which was actually quite good—and everything to do with the fact that Romney oscillated between contradictions and outright falsehoods. Here the most stunning examples:
“[I]nstead of answering those vital questions, President Obama came here yesterday and railed against arguments no one is making—and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies—setting up straw men to distract from his record.”
Not only did Mitt Romney praise Paul Ryan’s latest budget—which was adopted by congressional Republicans—but he was a support of last year’s “Roadmap,” and he pledged to sign a Ryan-like budget if it came to his desk. What’s more, in numerous campaign speeches, he has promised to “cut, cap, and balance” the federal budget, referencing a plan to slash federal spending and implement a balanced-budget amendment. If either policy were ever passed, it would have disastrous effects on programs for ordinary Americans. Romney may not have an explicit policy to kick children off of Medicaid or deny food aid to poor families, but if he were to follow through on his ideas and promises, that’s exactly what would happen.
President Obama’s answer to our economic crisis was more spending, more debt, and more government. By the end of his term in office, he will have added nearly as much public debt as all the prior Presidents combined.
If Romney is as knowledgeable about the economy as he says he is, then he must know that the increase in public debt has everything to do with the Great Recession and the drastic reduction in tax revenue that comes with economic collapse. Moreover, there’s the Bush tax cuts, which has kept revenue at historically low levels for more than a decade. If you remove both things from the equation—which, to my mind, is the fair thing to do—then Obama is responsible for far less debt than any of his recent predecessors.
In over three years, [Obama] has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve our entitlement crisis. Instead, he has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it.
He is the only President to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare. And, as a result, more than half of doctors say they will cut back on treating seniors.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this doesn’t make any sense. How is it possible to both cut $500 billion from Medicare and fail to enact a plan to deal with our entitlement problems? Presumably, a plan to fix entitlements would contain cuts to entitlement programs. Indeed, if it stands, the Affordable Care Act will implement cuts and attempt to control the overall growth of health spending. If successful, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will save $1 trillion over the next decade. That, to me, sounds like an entitlement plan.
Unlike President Obama, you don’t have to wait until after the election to find out what I believe in—or what my plans are.
The last month has been dominated by questions over Romney’s sincerity. Is he serious about the policies he proposed during the Republican primary, or will he abandon them as soon as he reaches the general election? And if he wins the presidency, there’s no clear sense of which Romney will emerge to take the oath of office; will it be the conservative ideologue who won the GOP nomination, or will it be the moderate businessman who pioneered health-care reform during his last stint in government? The only thing we truly know about Mitt Romney is that he wants to be president and that he’ll say whatever it takes to get there. He’s certainly in no position to tout his consistency.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 4, 2012
“Fool Me Once”: Why Do Reporters Think Mitt Romney Is A Moderate?
They keep saying it, but they don’t know whether it’s true.
I’m sorry, but I refuse to let this one go, even if I have to repeat myself. Time‘s Alex Altman writes, “A very conservative party is on the verge of nominating a relative moderate whom nobody is very excited about, largely because none of his rivals managed to cobble together a professional operation.” I beg you, Alex, and every other reporter covering the campaign: If you’re going to assert that Mitt Romney is a “relative moderate,” you have to give us some evidence for that assertion. Because without mind-reading, we have to way to know whether it’s true.
What we do know is that when he ran in two races in the extremely liberal state of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney was a moderate. Then when he ran in two races to be the Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney was and is extremely conservative. There is simply no reason—none—to believe, let alone to assert as though it were an undisputed fact, that the first incarnation of Romney was the “real” one and the current incarnation of Romney is the fake one.
Every single issue position that might mark Mitt Romney as a “relative moderate” is something he has cast off, whether it’s being pro-choice, or pro-gay rights, or not hating on immigrants. If you’re going to say he’s a relative moderate, you have to explain how the Massachusetts Romney was an expression of his true beliefs, and the national Romney is the product of cynical calculation, and how you know this to be the case.
It might be the case. But it is just as likely that the Massachusetts Romney was the fake one, and the current Romney is the sincere one. Or that neither one is real, because Romney simply has no actual beliefs about these issues. (I leave aside the possibility that they’re both real, and he underwent some genuine change of heart on most every issue after deciding to run for president. Because no one’s crazy enough to believe that.) So please, reporters: if you suspect that Mitt Romney is really a moderate, then say it’s a suspicion. But don’t treat it like a fact.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, April 4, 2012
“The New Nixon”: Nobody Really Believes Mitt Romney
Roll Call‘s Stu Rothenberg is not someone often accused of “liberal bias” or a thumb-on-the-scales in favor of Democrats. So his latest column, illustrating Mitt Romney’s chronic credibility problem as a product of his supporters as well as his detractors, is especially interesting. Perhaps I like it because he’s making a point I tend to obsess about but that is rarely made in bland assessments of Romney: the candidate has been moving as rapidly to the right as he can even as his image within the GOP has moved left. That shows the rightward velocity of the GOP, particularly since 2008. But it is also means that GOP voters are constantly aware of Mitt’s endless repositioning efforts, including moderate Republicans who happily vote for him because they assume he’s lying to the hard-core conservatives who increasingly dominate their party:
For years, ever since he started running against Sen. John McCain for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Romney has tried to position himself to the right. In fact, four years ago, he succeeded in positioning himself as one of two conservative alternatives (the other being former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee) to the Arizona Senator.
The exit poll from the Florida GOP primary on Jan. 29, 2008, when McCain narrowly beat Romney, 36 percent to 31 percent, and Huckabee came in a weak fourth, showed Romney rallying Republican conservatives who could not accept McCain…..
This cycle, Romney has run right again, to establish his conservative credentials, but he has not been successful. Instead, each and every week, he has performed best among the same voters who chose McCain over him four years ago — and he has done least well among those demographic groups that supported him in 2008.
Romney’s great problem in the GOP race, as pretty much everyone has already observed, is that conservatives don’t really believe that he is one of them….
What’s interesting about Romney and his supporters is that, despite his conservative rhetoric, moderates and country club conservatives continue to support his candidacy.
Think about it. Romney, who stresses his opposition to abortion, talks tough on immigration and rules out a tax increase even to help cut the deficit, continues to get the support of pragmatic conservatives who reject former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s ideological rigidity, thought Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) was too conservative and viewed Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a bomb thrower.
Clearly, establishment Republicans also don’t believe Romney when he talks about his views and his agenda. If they did, they probably would feel about him the same way they feel about Santorum or Bachmann.
Romney’s great asset is that these voters figure he is merely pandering to evangelicals and the most conservative element of the GOP when he talks about cultural issues, immigration and taxes.
The bottom line, of course, is that nobody — not his critics and not his allies — really believes Mitt Romney.
And that’s among Republicans.
For all the differences in personality and background, that’s why I’ve always thought of Mitt as the New Nixon. He may succeed politically because people with money figure he’ll do what it takes for him–and them–to win, because he’s a safer bet than his opponents, and even because people are cynical enough about him to assume he won’t let principles get in the way of doing things the country obviously needs. But (with the obvious exception of LDS folk) he’s not going to inspire much of anybody, and can ascend to a victory over Barack Obama only on the dark wings of an exceptionally nasty negative campaign reinforced by disheartening external events.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 3, 2012
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