Even before its report was released, Washington hearts were aflutter and tongues were a-wagging about the Obama deficit reduction commission. The bipartisan blue-ribbon bunch solemnly vowed they would propose $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases, a ratio reminiscent of past tax-hiking budget agreements. Whatever fat is trimmed from the budget, overall both taxes and spending usually end up rising.
Anything adopted in response to the Bowles-Simpson recommendations is likely to follow this familiar pattern. After all, who is the White House more inclined to listen to: Americans for Tax Reform, which is sounding the alarm against trillions of dollars of new revenue on the table, or the AARP, which is already on the warpath against unspecified and improbable spending cuts? To ask the question is to answer it.
But the Bowles-Simpson commission’s 15 minutes of fame is as good a time as any to examine the Republican divide over deficits. On the one side there are green-eyeshade Republicans who care about the national debt and believe in balanced budgets. Unfortunately, their approach to dealing with deficits and Democrats is often similar to Charlie Brown’s approach to Lucy and the football: these Republicans go along with tax increases in the mistaken belief that FDR’s disciples will cooperatively take an axe to entitlement programs. End result: what Newt Gingrich called tax collectors for the welfare state.
Then there are the Republicans who are such wild-eyed supply-siders that they believe things about tax cuts that the original supply-side economists never claimed. In just the past few months, we have heard the top two Republicans in the Senate say that tax cuts necessarily increase revenues, just as John McCain did in an interview with a conservative magazine before clinching the GOP nomination. There is the (possibly apocryphal) Dick Cheney quote about how Reagan taught us “deficits don’t matter” and Jack Kemp’s well-documented assertions that spending cuts are a form of “root-canal politics.”
Read more at The American Spectator.
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