Getting to yes
by digby
Daniel Foster at NRO makes the case for Republicans going for the Corker Plan (which he describes as “Romney’s plan made flesh with more plausible math and greater respect for political constraints.”)
But as a starting point for negotiations, the Corker plan has a lot to recommend it. Most critically, it meets the Democrats’ sine qua non of concentrating tax hikes on wealthier taxpayers. But it does so while making the Bush tax rates a permanent feature of the tax code, instead of the ever-expiring creatures of “reconciliation” gimmickry they currently are. This simple change will avert the regularly scheduled crises we’ve enjoyed for the last four years. It will mean Democrats can’t raise taxes in the future through mere inaction. It will dramatically simplify the twisted ways we talk about taxes (you’ll spend far less time explaining to your friends the difference between “current law” and “current policy”). And if you think that perpetuating the myth that raising rates on the rich will solve our problems is more pernicious than actually raising rates on the rich, the Corker approach will deny Democrats a cheap psychological and rhetorical victory. New revenue through limiting deductions can be plausibly sold as part of broader tax-code reform, not a capitulation on the overloaded question of whether the “rich” are paying their “fair share.” In the conservative long-game, having the first conversation instead of the second matters, big time.
I’ve always thought the Republicans might someday realize that some of their long-game goals were in reach with these negotiations if they could just find a way to finesse the pesky temporary tax hike issue. Whether they will is another story. Foster conveniently lays out the reasons why they may not do it:
Now, Corker might be overselling a bit. Such are our fiscal woes that taking a four-and-a-half-trillion-dollar bite out of the debt gets us roughly a quarter of the way home. So it’d be closer to right if Corker said that anything short of starting in earnest to solve the problem would be a failure. But you might think that only massive deficit reduction will do, and that the Republicans ought to offer dead-weight resistance to any plan that doesn’t, say, balance the budget over ten years or fundamentally restructure the size and shape of the federal government. Or you might think that the Republicans should back only a Band-Aid, do just enough to avert catastrophe (again) and wait for 2013 or 2015 to take another shot under more favorable conditions. And if you think either of those things, you probably don’t think Corker’s approach is the best thing going.
I’m going to guess that the real question is whether they want to take yes for an answer now on program cuts or wait until 2013 or 2015 to take another shot. The idea that they really care about massive deficit reduction is belied by their history.
And keep in mind that this “moderate” plan pretty much decimates the safety net in exchange for some tepid tax hikes. But that’s still moderate in their eyes: if tax hikes are now the Democrats’ sine qua non I think it’s safe to say that stopping tax hikes has long been the Republican sine qua non as well. After all, there’s only one president in the last 30 years who actually balanced a budget and left a surplus and it wasn’t a Republican. (A lot of good that did for the Dems …)
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