The GOP opposition to tax increases is based on Democrat bad faith
Image by SS&SS via FlickrThe Republican Party once had a home for the thinking of Tom Coburn, Mike Crapo and Saxby Chambliss. But that party has been gone for more than 20 years.It is a long article but it leaves out the history where Democrats have promised spedning restraint in return for tax increases then gone on to ever greater spending sprees. There is also the defeat of Bush 41 after agreeing to one of these deals. There is zero upside to any Republican who falls for this Democrat scam again.
The three U.S. senators banded together a few months ago in support of higher tax revenue as a means of rebalancing the federal budget. Even with drastic spending cuts, they concluded that Washington could not vanquish its soaring $14.3 trillion debt without additional income.
Such reasoning was common in the GOP circa 1963, when Republicans denounced tax cuts proposed by President John F. Kennedy as a road to red ink and rampant inflation. But today’s GOP adheres to a “no new taxes” orthodoxy that has proved far more powerful than the desire to balance the budget. As House Speaker John A. Boehner has said: Raising taxes is “unacceptable and a non-starter.”
This orthodoxy is now woven so deeply into the party’s identity that all but 13 of 288 GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes. The strategist who invented the pledge, Grover G. Norquist, compares it to a brand, like Coca-Cola, built on “quality control” so that Republican voters know they’ll get “the same thing every time.”
Loyalty to the brand is so strong that no Republican has voted for a major federal tax increase since 1991, Norquist says. It is so widespread that more than a dozen governors and hundreds of state legislators now count themselves as adherents. And it is so well defended that its followers are constantly patrolling at both the state and federal levels for new forms of trespass.
...
They do not mean to cut spending period. Since they took over Congress in 2006 the spending as a percent of GDP has skyrocketed to 25 percent. That is an unsustainable amount no matter what the tax rate. Revenues have been a fairly consistent 20 percent of GDP regardless of the rate in most years so the Democrat plan just will not work unless spending comes down to no more than 20 percent of GDP.
Comments
Post a Comment