Failure to articulate core belief lost the Republican Party a presidential election last month and now disarms it on fiscal policy.
Democrats, led by triumphant President Barack Obama, have turned the opposition party into a grotesque caricature: a political club committed first to welfare of the wealthy.
In high-pressure negotiations over federal taxation and spending, Obama is widely seen as having proffered a “balanced” package of measures, which his Republican counterpart, House Speaker John Boehner, has rejected solely for increasing tax rates on rich Americans.
To be sure, Republicans tend to dislike tax hikes on anyone; on this matter, indeed, some won’t compromise.
But taxation isn’t the only issue.
The supposedly balanced proposal Obama sent Boehner at the end of November, by way of Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner, contained another incendiary morsel: at least $50 billion in immediate “stimulus” spending.
Those outlays might totally offset savings from Medicare and other programs Obama said he’d be willing to seek. They also would extend an unprecedented spending spree begun in Obama’s first term that has rapidly expanded federal debt and boosted the economy little if at all.
Before the election, Republicans decried the spending but didn’t follow through with righteous denunciation of the fallacy used to justify it. The evidence was at hand: 4 years of historic spending and scant stimulus. So was a glaring ideological target: insistence by Obama’s supporters that failure meant only that the government hadn’t spent enough.
Republicans could have—should have—smashed the asserted link between government spending and national prosperity but either couldn’t find the intellectual hammer or didn’t swing it hard enough.
The economy thus remains the dependent variable in a dangerous experiment. Republicans still bray about spending without challenging the assumptions driving it. And Democrats stomp them for opposing tax hikes on rich people, as though that were all that mattered.
Republicans will lose this fight. And Democrats soon thereafter will be back insisting that tax rates, like spending levels, just aren’t high enough.
(Online Dec. 14, 2012: author’s e-mail: [email protected])