David Brooks on the Republican Party

Conservative commentator David Brooks wrote this:

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.

A Megaphone for the Mega-Deficits

By 2014, the world's biggest economies are likely to have public debt equal to their GDP. This is not necessarily debilitating: many households owe more on their mortgage than they make in a year. But it is not something we should be happy about.

Critics are right to wring their hands about the deficit that Obama's building up. But the commentary on the right is annoying on two points. One, while Bush was stacking up IOUs like leaves in fall, they were silent on the issue of deficit spending. Two, they gloss over the fact that Obama is going to have outrageous deficits because he started with outrageous deficits. $1 trillion of the deficit from this year is inherited from Bush.

We've had worse deficits (as a percentage of GDP) than Bush's, but not during an expansion. And not so quickly after we were running a surplus.

The Republican Party used to be well populated by fiscal conservatives. That is, people who liked to avoid deficit spending. The GOP was hijacked (a story well told by Jonathan Chait in his book, The Big Con) and all the fiscal conservatives were muzzled. At least until now.

I don't even mind that the fiscal conservatives have been given a voice again. I think it is healthy. But until they start their critique with a expose of the massive spending increase and deficits run up by their own party for the 6 years it owned Congress and the White House, their words lack credibility. Bush's budgets became the new baseline from which any stimulus package had to start.

By definition, a stimulus package will increase the deficit. If Obama had - like Bush - inherited a surplus, his stimulus package would not have required huge deficits. It might not have even required deficits.

It's important not to be quiet about the deficit. It is just as important to be honest about its cause.

Chait's The Big Con - Lobbyists, Taxes, and Attacks on Character

From Jonathan Chait's The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, 2007

The Bush administration has routinely - so routinely it no longer makes news - appointed lobbyists to oversee their former employers. Harvey Pitt, Bush's first choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, had made his name defending the accounting industry, Ivan Boesky, and anybody else seeking more lenient treatment of financial malfeasance. Pitt took the helm of the SEC and promised a "kinder, gentler" agency where "we aren't going to play gotcha." ... Mark Weinberger, the Bush treasury official charged with regulating tax shelters, is a former lobbyist for purveyors of tax shelters. Soon after taking office he declared, "I want to change the 'us' versus 'them' mentality - the 'us' being government, the 'them' being business.

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Workers in the middle of the income scale pay about 16 percent of their income in federal taxes, whereas those in the top 1 percent pay about 25 percent. But that's offset in part by state and local taxes, which hit the poor and middle class much harder. Taking into account all taxes, the top 1 percent pay a third of their income in taxes, and the middle fifth pay 27.5% of their income. This is a very moderately progressive system.

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The plan to defeat Clinton's policies by weakening his personal image worked perfectly. In 1994, for instance, a Wall Street Journal poll found that every element of the Clinton health plan commanded majority support. Only when it was identified as "the Clinton plan" did respondents turn against it.