“The Comeback Skid”: Chris Christie’s “Jersey Comeback” Is Playing The Same Paul Ryan Game
There will be two big stars at the Republican National Convention, and neither of them will be Mitt Romney. One will, of course, be Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate. The other will be Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who will give the keynote address. And while the two men could hardly look or sound more different, they are brothers under the skin.
How so? Both have carefully cultivated public images as tough, fiscally responsible guys willing to make hard choices. And both public images are completely false.
I’ve written a lot lately deconstructing the Ryan myth, so let me turn today to Mr. Christie.
When Mr. Christie took office in January 2010, New Jersey — like many other states — was in dire fiscal straits thanks to the effects of a depressed economy. Unlike the federal government, states are required by their constitutions to run more or less balanced budgets every year (although there is room for accounting gimmicks), so like other governors, Mr. Christie was forced to engage in belt-tightening.
So far so normal: while Mr. Christie has made a lot of noise about his tough budget choices, other governors have done much the same. Nor has he eschewed budget gimmicks: like earlier New Jersey governors, Mr. Christie has closed budget gaps in part by deferring required contributions to state pension funds, which is in effect a form of borrowing against the future, and he has also sought to paper over budget gaps by diverting money from places like the Transportation Trust Fund.
If there is a distinctive feature to New Jersey’s belt-tightening under Mr. Christie, it is its curiously selective nature. The governor was willing to cancel the desperately needed project to build another rail tunnel linking the state to Manhattan, but has invested state funds in a megamall in the Meadowlands and a casino in Atlantic City.
Also, while much of his program involves spending cuts, he has effectively raised taxes on low-income workers and homeowners by slashing tax credits. But he vetoed a temporary surcharge on millionaires while refusing to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which is the third-lowest in America and far below tax rates in neighboring states. Only some people, it seems, are expected to make sacrifices.
But as I said, Mr. Christie talks a good (and very loud) game about his willingness to make tough choices, making big claims about spending cuts — claims, by the way, that PolitiFact has unequivocally declared false. And for the past year he has been touting what he claims is the result of those tough choices: the “Jersey comeback,” the supposed recovery of his state’s economy.
Strange to say, however, Mr. Christie has told reporters that he won’t use the term “Jersey comeback” in his keynote address. And it’s not hard to see why: the comeback, such as it was, has hit the skids. Indeed, the latest figures show his state with the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Strikingly, New Jersey’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate is now significantly higher than the unemployment rate in long-suffering Michigan, which has had a true comeback thanks to the G.O.P.-opposed auto bailout.
Now, state governors don’t actually have much impact on short-run economic performance, so the skidding New Jersey economy isn’t really Mr. Christie’s fault. Still, he was the one who chose to make it an issue. And even more important, he’s still pushing the policies the state’s recovery was supposed to justify.
You see, all that boasting about the Jersey comeback wasn’t just big talk (although it was that, too). It was, instead, supposed to demonstrate that good times were back, revenue was on the upswing, and it was now time for what Mr. Christie really wants: a major cut in income taxes.
Even if the comeback were real, this would be a highly dubious idea. By all accounts, New Jersey still has a significant structural deficit, that is, a deficit that will persist even when the economy recovers. Furthermore, the Christie tax-cut proposal would do very little for the middle class but give large breaks to the wealthy.
But in any case, the good times are by no means back, and neither is the revenue boom that was supposed to justify a tax cut. So has the very responsible Mr. Christie accepted the idea of at least delaying his tax-cut plan until the promised revenue gains materialize? Of course not.
Which brings me back to the comparison with Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan, as people finally seem to be realizing, is at heart a fiscal fraud, boasting about his commitment to deficit reduction but actually placing a much higher priority on tax cuts for the wealthy. Mr. Christie may have a different personal style, but he’s playing the same game.
In other words, meet the new boaster, same as the old boaster. And pray that we won’t get fooled again.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 26, 2012
“Giving Way To Angrier Politics”: Republican Convention Is Sign That Republican Grip On Sun Belt Is Loosening
For more than 50 years, the Sun Belt — the band of states that extends from Florida to California — has been the philosophical heart and electoral engine of the Republican Party. It was more than just a source of votes. The Sun Belt infused the Republican Party with a frontier spirit: the optimistic, free-ranging embrace of individualism and the disdain for big government and regulation.
From Richard M. Nixon through John McCain, a span of 48 years, every Republican presidential candidate save for Gerald R. Ford and Bob Dole has claimed ties to the Sun Belt. The last Republican president, George W. Bush, made a point of fixing his political compass in Texas once he was done with Yale and Harvard Business School, complete with what many heard as a slightly exaggerated drawl, as had his father, a Connecticut Yankee turned Texas oilman.
Yet as Republicans gather here this week, they are nominating for president a governor of Massachusetts who was born in Michigan and, for vice president, a congressman from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Sun Belt states that were once reliable parts of the Republican electoral map are turning blue or have turned blue, like California. Only Southern notches of the belt remain. And the sunny symbol of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat cutting wood, as good an image of the Sun Belt spirit as there was, has given way to the angrier politics of the Tea Party, which embraces much of the same anti-government message but with a decidedly different tone.
The Sun Belt remains an economic, political and cultural force. But the 40th Republican National Convention is a sign that the Republicans’ grip on it is loosening. The nominations of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan could mark the end of an era.
“It’s really a dramatic change in the 30-some-odd years since I ran Reagan’s campaign,” said Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant. “I began with a base, even when we were 30 points down, when Reagan asked me to run his campaign. The West Coast is gone, and those are big numbers.” Stuart Spencer, another senior Reagan campaign adviser, said Reagan at once personified and defined himself as a creature of the Sun Belt. “That’s where we started, and we added from there,” he said. “But Colorado is in play now. Nevada is in play.”
How did this happen?
For one thing, the Republican who came riding in as the candidate of the Sun Belt — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas — stumbled. But there are larger forces at work that lead many analysts to think that a long-lasting shift is under way. The Sun Belt is in many ways not what it was when Barry Goldwater came on the scene. Once the very symbol of economic prosperity and untrammeled growth, it has been pummeled by the collapse of the housing market.
“There is a soaring rate of poverty in these new suburban regions,” said Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard who studies the region. “I think it’s bound to have a political impact and to transform the ability of the Republican Party to appeal to suburbanites with private, individualistic solutions.”
More transformative is the demographic shift brought on by the influx of Latino voters. It is upending the political makeup of states like Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida. And it has come when the Republican Party has been identified with tough measures aimed at curbing immigration.
Many Republicans date the beginning of the decline to 1994, when Republicans in California backed a voter initiative, Proposition 187, to deny government services to immigrants in this country illegally. The law was eventually nullified by a federal court.
“Once California started alienating Latinos and once Latinos started moving in large numbers to Arizona and in Texas, that changes the whole game,” said Richard White, a professor of history at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.
The change has been noted in places like Orange County, Calif., home to the Nixon presidential library and once a symbol of conservative political power and for many years overwhelmingly white. Today, it is filled with enclaves of Latinos and Asians — on many streets, it is hard to find an English-language sign on a store — and only about 43 percent of the voters are registered Republican.
Eventually, some say, even Texas might move to the Democratic column as more Latinos move in and vote. Even though Florida continues to vote Republican in statewide elections, indications are that the increasing presence of non-Cuban Hispanics could tilt the state leftward.
“The real question now in Florida is whether the I-4 corridor — between Daytona and Tampa — is becoming more Democratic than independent,” said Joseph Gaylord, a Republican consultant who lives there. “Texas and Florida offset California. And there’s no way a Republican can become president if you don’t win Texas and Florida.”
If the political allegiances of the Sun Belt are shifting, the changes in its political philosophy, represented by the increasing power of the Tea Party in states like this and Arizona, are slightly more nuanced. The view of government expressed by Tea Party members is not that different from what Reagan or Goldwater might have said.
But Mr. Spencer, the Reagan hand, believes that the Tea Party would never have embraced Reagan. “He was a pragmatist,” Mr. Spencer said. “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 13 times at least” in his years as governor and president.
It was Reagan whose election as president seemed to mark the coming of the political age of the Sun Belt, but also of what Kenneth M. Duberstein, the White House chief of staff for Reagan, referred to as “the lock”: the notion that the Republican Party could consider the Sun Belt in the political bank. As late as 2002, Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to George W. Bush, was arguing that California was fertile ground for Republicans.
“Reagan in many ways seemed to be the beginning of the wave, but in retrospect, it’s going to be remembered as the peak of the wave,” Mr. White said. He suggested that Mr. McCain’s defeat in 2008 might come to carry its own political symbolism.
“It’s always hard to say things based on one election, but he will probably be seen as the tail end of it,” Mr. White said.
By: Adam Nagourney, LA Bureau Chief, The New York Times, August 25, 2012
“A Trial Baloon Leak”: Social Conservatives Won’t Let Romney Pick Condi, Christie or Daniels
The Romney campaign played the media for a bunch of saps last week. After The Boston Globe revealed that Romney had continued to work for Bain Capital for several years longer than he claimed, they wanted to change the conversation. Talking about how he may have lied to either the Federal Election Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission about his time with Bain is not what he wanted to do.
So on Thursday his campaign leaked to the Drudge Report that former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was at the top of his vice-presidential shortlist. The national media started chattering about this ostentatiously false claim. The Beltway media has apparently never met any actual Republicans. Beltway Republicans, of course, are fiscal and social conservatives but, being educated people, they are much less likely to oppose abortion rights and gay rights, and even less likely still to care deeply about the issues than are average Republican voters. Being apparently too lazy to do any reporting on whether the Republican Party could conceivably nominate a pro-choice woman to be Vice-President, or to just read Game Change which reports that John McCain and his staffers did not mind at all that Joe Lieberman is pro-choice but ultimately accepted that they could not pick as running mate because the Republican National Convention would be in revolt, they took this preposterous notion about Rice seriously. As Media Matters noted, ABC, NBC and The Wall Street Journal reported the Rice rumor as if it were a serious possibility.
ABC’s Jonathan Karl noted that Drudge “has been accurate on Romney before.” Well, how is Drudge’s accuracy on previous vice-presidential selections? Not too good, as The American Spectator’s Jonathan Tabin points out: “Four years ago, Matt Drudge reported that Barack Obama was likely to select Evan Bayh as his running mate. Eight years ago, Drudge reported that John Kerry was likely to select Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Twelve years ago, Drudge reported that George W. Bush’s likely pick was Frank Keating.”
Romney has pledged to select a reliable conservative on social issues, and his campaign has privately reassured conservative pundits that this is the rare promise he will actually keep. Erick Erickson. “We’ve gotten assurance that he’ll stick to his pledge,” says Bryan Fischer, director of issue advocacy for the American Family Association. Erick Erickson, editor of the blog Red State, tweeted on the very night of Drudge’s report, “Multiple assurances from Team Romney tonight that Condi is not happening for Veep.”
“I’m guessing the Romney campaign leaked it as a trial balloon to see how social conservatives react,” Fischer speculates.
They reacted with horror. The word “non-starter” comes up repeatedly. “She’s a non-starter because she’s pro-abortion and soft on homosexual unions,” says Fischer.
“The former Secretary of State would be a non-starter choice mainly because she doesn’t fit the criteria that Governor Romney set for his VP pick,” wrote Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, in a statement. “During the primaries, Romney made very clear that his vice president would be pro-life, pro-marriage and a strong defender of religious liberty – and while Ms. Rice is many things, her record shows those three she is not. When you look at the Republican Party, there is no doubt that the pro-life position is a non-negotiable.”
Richard Viguerie, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, picking Rice would be a “slap in the face” to conservatives.
Romney has even less room to maneuver on social issues when choosing a running mate than McCain did. Besides being a Mormon, Romney supported gay rights and abortion rights when he ran for office in Massachusetts. Evangelicals remained skeptical of him throughout the primaries. As long as the race was competitive, Romney was virtually guaranteed to lose the Evangelical vote in each state to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.
Social conservative leaders also emphasize that they want to see the ticket balanced by adding a vociferous social conservative to balance Romney’s squishiness. “Romney needs an unapologetic and unwavering defender of the right to life and traditional marriage,” says Fischer. “He cannot afford a pro-abortion running mate. That’s suicidal. Social conservatives have enough doubts about him. He needs a running mate who strengthens his social conservatives.”
“Mitt Romney needs someone who undergirds the social policy positions that he has taken since he was governor of Massachusetts,” wrote Perkins. “He needs someone who has an impeccable pro-life record, not just someone who checks the ‘pro-life box.’ There are a number of better qualified individuals out there who have led on the life issues and would not deflate enthusiasm from his base.”
Which other rumored running mates would be considered too passive on social issues by the religious right? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. “Christie is just not strong on the homosexual agenda,” says Fischer. “Mitch Daniels would be a disaster because he’s the guy who called for ‘a truce’ on social issues. If you call for a truce and the other side doesn’t, that’s not a truce, that’s surrender.”
Among the names that top social conservatives privately toss around? Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rep. Allen West (R-FL). Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor who now hosts a weekend talk show on Fox News and a new radio program, is also frequently mentioned. But, according to Huckabee, he is not being vetted. “There’s no indication whatsoever that I’m even on the list of consideration,” says Huckabee. “I assume I’m not. I think if I had been, there would have been some inquiry at this point, there hasn’t been.”
Regarding Rice, Huckabee shares the concerns voiced by other conservatives. “I have great admiration for Condoleeza Rice, and I think she served her country well,” says Hucakbee. (Huckabee is always more diplomatic towards those he disagrees with than most conservative leaders.) “I do think her selection would be problematic for a number of conservatives. Governor Romney made it clear his vice-presidential selection would be a pro-life person. [Rice’s] comments in the past would make it very very difficult for people like me to be supportive. [I could be] supportive of her maybe as Secretary of State or ambassador to any place, but not vice president.” Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention expressed a similar sentiment to CNN, saying, “I love Condi Rice, I’d love to see her in any role in Romney administration except vice president.”
Huckabee also issues a stern warning to Romney about the risk he would entail in picking someone who is not sufficiently conservative on social issues, although he avoids naming other names. “I think [Romney] is going to make his own decision and calculate the risk of picking someone who may cause the base of the party, which really is those social conservatives, to just not be that enthusiastic,” says Huckabee.
“What he can not risk, in my opinion, is anything less than high intensity. He needs someone who will rally those voters, not chill them. They’re highly motivated to replace Barack Obama. But I think it’s a great mistake to believe they’re automatically going to be as enthusiastic about knocking on doors and working phone banks if he were to place somebody in the position who wasn’t a stalwart leader and has all the credentials to give some comfort that those issues are not going to be set aside.”
Huckabee also suggested that a disappointing vice-presidential selection would signal to social conservatives that they will just be ignored after Romney has used them to win the election. “Conservatives have been burned way too many times,” says Huckabee. “Social conservatives get used every four years, trotted out at the rallies to stand there for five hours, scream and yell for the candidate, knock on doors, make the phone calls, carry signs. When the election is over, they’re promptly forgotten, put up in the attic and asked not to come out in public again for another four years. I think a lot of people have grown tired of that, so hopefully that’s not going to be the case this year.”
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 15, 2012
“The RNC Can Thank John Roberts For A Job Well Done”: GOP Super PACs Dominate Early Ads With Lies
The five Republican stooges on the Supreme Court must be very happy. They clearly hoped to give Republicans an advantage in future elections when they took the extreme judicial activist measure in the Citizens United v. FEC decision of overturning a major chunk of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance–reform law. By opening the floodgates to unlimited secret corporate contributions, they figured that they would help the party of corporate cronyism outspend Democrats. So far, they are being proven right.
The most recent financial disclosure reports released by the Federal Elections Commission over the weekend show conservative Super PACs heavily out raising and outspending liberal ones. And while President Obama will be able to compete financially because his campaign will raise plenty of money on its own, Democrats may be at a serious disadvantage in down ballot races where candidate fundraising is considerably lower and a national Super PAC can deluge a small media market with misleading negative advertisements and mailings.
“Conservative interest groups have dumped well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year, outspending their liberal opponents 4 to 1 and setting off a growing panic among Democrats struggling to regain the House and hold on to their slim majority in the Senate,” reports the Washington Post. “The money could be particularly crucial in races below the national radar that can be easily influenced by infusions of outside spending.”
So far this money is being used to drive the future Republican caucuses in the House and Senate further to the right. From the Post:
One example came this week in Nebraska, where a dark-horse Republican Senate candidate upset two better-funded rivals in the GOP primary thanks in part to a last-minute, $250,000 ad buy by a billionaire-backed super PAC. And in Indiana this month, veteran Sen. Richard G. Lugar was ousted in the GOP primary by challenger Richard Mourdock with the help of millions of dollars in spending by conservative groups. The Club for Growth, which backed a losing candidate in Nebraska, spent more than $2 million to help Mourdock in Indiana.”
Up until now there were other theoretical explanations—besides the obvious one, which is that it pays to be a tool of the rich and powerful—for why Republicans had so much more Super PAC money than Democrats. Initially Republicans supported the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that created Super PACs and Democrats, especially President Obama, did not. So Republicans jumped out to an early lead in Super PAC fundraising, which allowed them to vastly outspend Democrats in close congressional races in 2010. Then in 2011 and early 2012, Republicans were engaged in a competitive presidential primary while Democrats were not, and Super PAC spending was heavy on behalf of candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich but not President Obama. Obama gave Democratic donors the green light to pour money into the Priorities USA Super PAC, but it has not kept pace with its Republican counterparts. The Huffington Post reports, “The group has raised $10.57 million since being founded in 2011, far behind the $50-plus million raised by Restore Our Future and the $28 million raised by American Crossroads.”
But they aren’t anywhere near parity yet and they may never reach it. The reason is obvious. Republicans represent the narrow economic interests of entrenched wealth and privilege, while Democrats advocate for a stronger social safety net and reduced inequality. This has always given Republicans some advantage in fundraising, since the wealthy will obviously give more than the poor or middle class. But the wealthy are also fewer, and their donations were limited to reasonable maximums by campaign finance law, while corporations were banned from giving to candidates. Now that corporations and billionaires have a vehicle for unlimited donations, just one of them can give more than if millions of Americans each donated their entire savings. Giving to Republicans can turn a profit when they are elected and fulfill their promises to crush collective bargaining, quash environmental and workplace safety regulations, and cut taxes. So corporations and their wealthy owners have an incentive beyond mere ideology to give heavily.
And so the partisan disparity in Super PAC spending on congressional races from 2010 is being recreated in 2012. During the Republican presidential primaries in some states, Super PAC spending on advertising outstripped spending by the campaigns themselves. As the New York Times notes, “Through the middle of May, Restore Our Future had spent more than $44.5 million on advertising, direct mail and other advertising, roughly double what Mr. Romney’s campaign had spent during the same period.” If that holds true in the general election, it will favor Republicans, especially in down ballot races, immensely.
These advertisements that conservative Super PACs buy, which are nominally about educating the public rather than electing candidates, are in no way educational. In fact, much like Fox News coverage, which often repeats the claims these ads make verbatim and without fact-checking, they are primarily focused on spreading lies.
Consider the recent ad buys, including one of $25 million, by Crossroads. In April Crossroads released an ad attacking Obama for being an unserious “celebrity” who appears on late night television while the country goes to Hell. Its statistic to burnish this dark view: “Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad.” What survey? It turns out, according to Politifact, that the survey in question was the product of an obscure and now defunct firm that will not divulge any information about its methodology. But the firm’s director did say the survey was done “years ago” and is therefore not appropriate for use in an ad on the current president’s record in office. A March 2012 report from the Pew Center found 42 percent of college graduates 18 to 29 years-old living at home. The ad earned a “false” rating from Politifact.
And the ad that is getting $25 million worth of airtime? Factcheck.org finds its central claim to be “almost entirely false.” They write:
The latest multimillion-dollar attack ad from Crossroads GPS claims President Obama broke a promise to not increase taxes for families making less than $250,000 a year. That’s almost entirely false.
The truth is that Obama repeatedly cut taxes for such families, first through a tax credit in effect for 2009 and 2010, and beginning in 2011, through a reduction in the payroll tax that is worth $1,000 this year to workers earning $50,000 a year. And while it’s true that some tax increases contained in the new health care law would fall on individuals, they have mostly not taken effect yet and are small compared with the cuts the president already enacted. And this ad exaggerates them greatly.
The other claims in the ad are judged by Factcheck.org to be “misleading,” and you can read their full debunking here.
Of course, Super PACs are legally barred from coordinating with campaigns and there is the possibility, remote as it may be, that some Super PAC spending can do more harm than good. Last week Romney condemned a plan by billionaire investor Joe Ricketts to run a $10 million ad campaign tying President Obama to the inflammatory statements of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. As Politico notes:
The risk from rogue third-party groups is a potential menace to both Republicans and Democrats. The GOP has seen more super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups form to support its candidates, but there’s nothing to stop an individual liberal gazillionaire from commissioning ads on a subject the Obama campaign doesn’t want to talk about — say, Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. And rogue ads could create friendly fire as much as score points against the opposition, as the official GOP’s repudiation of the Ending Spending plan showed.
But that too can be a blessing as much as a curse. Draft dodger George W. Bush disassociated himself with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smearing of war hero John Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam. But Bush benefited enormously from the widely repeated claims in the ads. Even news stories debunking the falsehoods peddled by the Swift Boat group may have reinforced negative images of Kerry. Certainly it put him on the defensive. Indeed, this outsourcing of attacks—with a wink and a nudge—has been around almost as long as television commercials for candidates. The most famously effective attack ad in recent presidential politics, the 1988 commercial blaming Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for a murder committed by a convict named Willie Horton who was out of prison in a furlough program, was not actually paid for by Dukakis’ opponent, George H.W. Bush, but by an outside group. Romney may have ultimately benefited from the opportunity to remind voters of Obama’s inflammatory pastor without having to do so himself.
However the specifics of each ad play, it is clear that overall the flood of money from billionaires and corporations into campaigns is helping one party more than the other. The RNC can thank John Roberts for a job well done.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 22, 2012
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
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