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GOP debt rhetoric rings hollow

Once in a blue moon, you get the chance to look behind the curtain of public rhetoric and image management that defines our national politics and see the true id of our two political parties. It’s a bit like that widely popular tabloid feature, “Stars Without Makeup.”

The continuing debt-limit debate in Washington has offered the American people just this opportunity — to gain insight into the thought process and motivations of the modern Republican Party.

When House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last week turned his back on a grand bargain with President Barack Obama that could have potentially cut more than $4 trillion in spending, it provided compelling evidence that the truest impetus for GOP behavior is not cutting spending. It’s not reducing the deficit. It’s not even trimming the size of government. It is, above all, maintaining low tax rates. The cause of low taxes, particularly for those in the top tax bracket, trumps everything else.

Indeed, Republican control of government has never coincided with significant cuts in government spending or national debt. It’s been quite the opposite. But it has coincided with the most significant reduction in tax burdens in U.S. history. That’s the true GOP id.

All this might seem counterintuitive because, for longer than most Americans have been alive, conservative politicians have been railing against big government spending. In the 1930s and ’40s, powerful Republican voices attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the 1960s and ’70s, they took a vehement stand against President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Over the past 30 years, Republicans have been united in their opposition to “tax-and-spend, Big Government” Democrats.

When the modern conservative movement began its political ascendance in the mid-1960s with Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, the clarion call wasn’t low taxes; rather, it was to halt the ever-expanding welfare state and its alleged imfringement on personal freedom.

Even in the 2010 election, taxes were a sideshow to repeated Republican criticisms that the Obama administration’s fiscal policies had led to out-of-control spending and a monstrously expanded federal government. Republicans pledged that once in office, their goal would be to finally get a handle on Washington’s ever-flowing red ink.

Yet a Democratic president has given them the opportunity to achieve precisely this. In an effort to fundamentally reduce the federal deficit and reshape the federal government’s fiscal policies, Obama offered cuts not only in Medicare, Medicaid and discretionary spending but also that most cherished federal entitlement program, Social Security.

From the standpoint of small-government conservatism, this is the Holy Grail. That it was offered by a Democratic president is even more extraordinary — and politically beneficial.

Yet it was rejected because it came with a catch: a tepid array of tax increases on wealthy Americans and the closing of some tax loopholes. It wasn’t even a 1-1 ratio. By some accounts, more than 80 percent of the cuts would come in spending and the rest in revenue increases. That such a deal is being rejected is almost incomprehensible — and one would imagine that somewhere Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.

In the context of actual GOP fiscal policy rather than rhetoric over the past 40 years, however, it’s not terribly surprising.

President Ronald Reagan regularly talked about government as the problem rather than the solution. Yet after his presidency, federal expenditures were, in real terms, 25 percent higher than when he took office. During his two terms, U.S. national debt tripled.

Twelve years later, President George W. Bush went even further. Federal debt went from around $5.6 trillion to just under $10 trillion. Government spending exploded.

For both Reagan and Bush, their most resonant fiscal achievements were not reducing the size and scope of government or curtailing the deficit, but in cutting taxes.

Over and over for Republicans, the goal of reducing government has taken a back seat to the far larger goal of reducing taxes. To be sure, keeping revenues low is an effective way to limit government expenditures — and has long been the starve-the-beast rationale for the GOP assault on tax rates.

But the fact that Republicans rejected the effort to trim an astounding $3 trillion to $4 trillion from the federal budget suggests that this justification for maintaining low revenues has been lost. The orthodoxy of tax cuts has become the end in itself — divorced from the larger goal of shrinking government.

The irony is that, even as Republicans have repeatedly shown their lack of seriousness in cutting spending, Democrats have perversely taken up the baton — even though theirs is the party most committed to activist government.

Why are Democrats manning the spending cut barricades? It’s the bizarre politics of U.S. fiscal policy. President Bill Clinton cut spending, decreased the federal workforce and reduced the deficit — in part, to brush off the GOP charge that he was a traditional big-spending liberal.

Now, Obama floats proposals to shrink the welfare state to take the deficit and government spending off the table — even as polling data and empirical research repeatedly show that voters aren’t interested in deficit reduction and don’t punish presidents for increasing the deficit.

That he, a progressive Democrat, is prostrating himself at the altar of fiscal responsibility and offering cuts to cherished Democratic programs suggests how distorted U.S. fiscal debates have become.

One party preaches fiscal responsibility and never delivers. The other party delivers fiscal responsibility to avoid charges of deficit fickleness from the other, profligate party.

In fairness, Republicans have occasionally put themselves on the political hook for reducing spending: The recent, politically disastrous budget of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, is one obvious example.

But even that bill is chock full of tax-cutting giveaways: It reduced the top income tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, lowered the corporate tax rate and offered vague promises to close tax loopholes. And, in a familiar pattern, it would further explode the deficit.

In the end, for all the Republicans’ talk about cutting spending or balancing the budget, the events of the past week demonstrate convincingly that their rhetoric should be dismissed as political bluster.

The only thing the GOP really cares about is cutting taxes. When push comes to shove, it’s the only goal they truly fight for.

Michael A. Cohen is the author of “Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” He can be reached on twitter @speechboy71.

Article is here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59214.html

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this is all left-wing bullocks. if you want the truth, just listen to me. i'll tell you. the truth is, obama never - not once - put any specific plan for cuts on the table. his plans for cuts, goes no further than his talking points. this sentence, is his detailed plan: "four trillion in cuts over the next decade, with some entitlements on the table."

he wants the republicans to agree with that sentence? to vote for a law based on that? one that also includes $750 billion in tax hikes, up front? see, that article is right about one thing. this debt debate is peeling back the layers, and all it shows is that the democrats are still the democrats. it is just something they cannot do to shrink the size and cost of government, and impose fiscal discipline. hell, even the european socialists have been able to see that massive debts are unsustainable, and america has the most massive debt of any one entity in the entire history of mankind. yet the dems are predisposed to taxing and spending.

to back up my point, let's just see who has been serious about tackling our nation's financial woes. since the time that the democrats took the majority in congress (i think it was 06), but at least since obama came to power, the size of the u.s. government has just exploded. of the $14.5 trillion we now owe, $4.5 trillion has come just since obama came into office, and by the end of his 4th year, the administration estimates that the u.s. debt will be at $16.5 trillion. that's almost $6 trillion more than the day he took office. by contrast, the national debt expanded by $4.9 trillion in all of bush's two terms, and even he himself was spending too much.

and before this last budget battle we just had, the democrats didn't even bother to pass a budget on obama's watch, because the size of the numbers just looked too bad. yet now that obama has swooped down from the heavens at the last minute (in typical obama fashion) and taken the reigns, we're supposed to believe this guy is serious about making cuts?

during the budget debate, the republicans got burned. remember the $38 billion in cuts, that obama took the credit for, as "the largest cuts in history"? well, after all the accounting gimmickry, that only turned out to be about $352  million.


"A study from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reveals that it will only amount to a reduction of $352 million in non-war government spending for the rest of this fiscal year."

seems like peoples' memories are so short these days. you think the democrats are serious about cutting $4 trillion, or anything even approaching that?