From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did
Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting:
Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so.
“In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.”
What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal. So some wealthy people aren’t excited about it.”
And we know which squeaky wheels get their policies passed while others go wanting.
Heather Cox Richardson is on a similar topic, that of the Joe Biden’s SOTU callout of the GOP’s targeting social safety net programs (In particular, Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s “Plan to Rescue America” that incudes sunsetting all federal laws automatically after five years. Plus, with the GOP refusing to issue its own budget, it’s not clear what Republicans affirmatively stand for rather than against, Richardson writes:
In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services.
But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.
Whatever ails ya, tax cuts are their solution. And slashing the social safety net, a particularly unpopular stance Republicans sustain by gerrymandering themselves into congressional districts where Democrats are uncompetitve.
Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position.
Scott wants to “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt.” Cut taxes, stop socialism, etc., ad nauseum.
The GOP’s motto should be “Nasty, brutish, and short.”
But there is a factional struggle within the GOP between more mainstream Republicans (does that even apply?) such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Christian nationalist wing that wants to cut off aid to Ukraine even before demolishing our domestic safety net.
Their hatred of the liberal democracy that demands equality for all people has put those extremists on the side of authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both of whom have made attacking LGBTQ people a key feature of their championing of their “traditional values,” a cause the extremists like.
Perhaps like the contested value “freedom,” the left needs to take back some version of “traditional values.” Because the Christian nationalist view of what’s a tradtional American value bears very little resemblance to my “equality for all people” version. Why should their vision win? But it will if the left doesn’t show up to play.