The Republican Pledge … Not!

It must be election season.

We know this because we are being honored with another Republican Party pledge to reduce the size of government. Like all such seasonal arrivals it wears a bit thin over the years, but is greeted with enthusiasm and interest by the media whose responsibility it is to keep all the seasonal joys fresh, perky, and shiny-like-new for the children.

Bah humbug.

I do not have any quarrels with as sensibly thought through, politically mature, and internally consistent plan to reduce the role of government in an economy. I don’t agree with it, especially now, but I recognize that it is a long established and honorable, ideologically sound idea. The current UK government is implementing just such a policy, and looks as if it will achieve a very significant reduction in both the UK budget deficit and the intervention of the government in everyday economic life.

Again: this is not my preferred approach to economic policy management. But it is a clear and very coherent alternative to the more interventionist Keynesian policies I advocate here.

So hats off to those who advocate such a position. They form a worthy opposition. More to the point: voters benefit from having such a clear distinction between the two major parties. Choice is a good thing.

You already know where I am going with this …

Simply put: the Republicans don’t mean it. They haven’t actually meant it for years. This is why the Tea Party presents such a big threat to the mainstream GOP. The Tea Party folks do mean it.

For at least three decades it has been a perennial claim of the Republicans that they stand for smaller government and fiscal conservatism. They throw rude epithets at “tax and spend” Democrats with monotonous regularity. I think that voters have bought the line that the GOP stands for smaller government than the Democrats do.

That maybe the case in a rhetorical sense.

But substantively?

Not so much.

Actually, the opposite is true.

Ever since Reagan threw the country into enormous peacetime debt – remember Dick Cheney’s claim that deficits don’t matter? – the Republicans have backed away from any practical attempt to reduce government. In fact they have presided over the fastest growth of government since Johnson.

Both parties advocate big government. Either explicitly, as the Democrats do, or implicitly, as the GOP does.

So every election cycle we are treated to some form of The Pledge; and every post election period is characterized by a quick burst of forgetfulness by Republican leaders. They love spending on their districts as much as anyone.

Plus they know full well that American voters are very happy to receive government largesse. Whether it be Social Security, Medicare, or mortgage interest tax relief, Americans love receiving goodies. It would be political suicide to eliminate any of these deeply embedded programs. Last I looked, opinion polls show between 65% and 75% of Americans absolutely loving Social Security.

This helps explain why the Republicans are always making up stories about how close to the edge of disaster the Social Security program is. It has become tiresome to have to pint out how inaccurate that claim is. Frankly it gets boring having to do the very trivial math that shows how minor the tweaks are that would preserve Social Security forever. In all honesty, the problem for Social Security comes more from the Democrats who seem not to be willing to recognize that we should raise the retirement age or get rid of the payroll tax cap. Either would end the discussion once and for all, but both seem a problem for the left.

But at least the Democrats are being honest with their supporters. That’s more than the GOP is.

The Republicans have absolutely no intention of cutting government spending sufficiently to make the Federal budget balance. They cannot without cutting deeply into entitlements or defense [offense] spending. Both are hallowed. So the GOP is stuck on its rhetoric. And that’s not a happy place to be.

The current debate over the imminent Republican tax increase is a great example of the mess that the GOP creates for itself. It slashed government revenues back in 2001 when it had a firm grip on the entire government machinery. It ran Congress and it had the White House. If ever it was going to follow through on its pledge, it was back then.

But it chickened out.

It had a bad case of the willies.

So cowardly was it that it punted the entire issue forward. Hence the debate now going on. The tax cuts were temporary. Why? Because the rule back then required permanent tax cuts to be balanced by equally permanent spending cuts. Gulp! No can do. So the GOP only did the easy bit: it slashed taxes. The voters went nuts and applauded loudly. Lost in the hoopla was the minor detail that not one penny was cut from spending. Not one. On the contrary spending rose at an accelerated rate. Forget “tax and spend”. Please welcome “Borrow and spend”.

Bush thus emulated Reagan by doing a total U-turn on the cut government platform. So much for fiscal conservatism. Fiscal recklessness has become the watchword for the Republicans.

Which is why this week’s retread of the Pledge produced such a yawn from the public. And, surprisingly, was attacked the loudest by the right wingers within the conservative think tanks. The Tea Party people just laughed.

The fact is that Republican assurances that they will cut spending are worthless. They don’t mean it. They never announce a program of actual proposed cuts. They just position themselves as fiscally sound, as opposed to that other bunch. You know the other bunch: the ones who reduced the deficit and achieved a surplus back in the late 1990’s. Now that’s embarrassing.

One way of telling how annoying it must be to be a Republican hewing to the party line is the constant claim that the Clinton surplus was a result of Reagan policies. This elides the point. Clinton raised taxes in order to cut the Reagan deficits. The GOP howled bloody murder at the thought. They claimed that such tax increases would force the economy into ruin.They were wrong. But they continue to shout as if they were right. Never let facts muddy your argument.

All this is by way of saying that I remain highly skeptical of the newly released Pledge. It is mightily short on detail, and it has produced nothing but laughter and scorn on the right wing. Conservatives don’t like it, so I imagine it will be gently retired before the split in the Republican ranks develops further.

The country is ill served by this. We need choice. We need clear alternatives. We need to be able to assess the facts in the context of those choices. Smoke and mirrors merely obscures choice and makes it difficult to make that assessment.

We have just run through about three decades of highly right wing economic policy. We have also smashed ourselves onto the rocks. Those too phenomena are related. We should be discussing how to reverse course and how much government we can all tolerate. To do that properly we need both context and competing thoughts on how to go forward.

The one arena in which the Republicans followed through on their mantra was in deregulation. Like cutting taxes, cutting red tape is easy and popular. They also de-funded the IRS and a couple of other agencies. At least those moves are in line with their platform. The problem is that they piled on the spending in other areas. For instance Bush oversaw the biggest increase in Medicare since it inception. Hardly a conservative move, and one that is hated by right wingers to this day. The only problem with this is that they exposed the flaws of their own argument. The awful response to hurricane Katrina was directly a result of that de-funding. And the Bush era efforts to outsource defense spending – there were upwards of 140,000 private contract troops in Iraq – raised rather than lowered the cost of the war.

So the GOP record is not good. They are not a party of small government. They are party of small government revenues. The spending side … not so much.

They don’t have the fortitude to go to the voters with actual spending cuts. So they continue to publish Pledges that have no meaning. And they continue to mutter about privatizing Social Security and undoing health are reform without actually offering an alternative.

They just don’t mean it. Why anyone takes them seriously I don’t know.

And, as I said, that’s a shame. We need credible choices. Especially in difficult times.

This latest Pledge isn’t credible. We should all ignore it and demand proper policy suggestions instead. More importantly: if they are hell bent on avoiding a tax increase, what, precisely, are they proposing to cut? And, by how much?