Campaign season generally attracts lots of wildly unrealistic promises, but the Republicans’ new “Pledge to America” – a reprise of the party’s quickly forgotten 1994 “Contract with America” – offers far more than the usual dose of hot-air campaign rhetoric and nonspecific prescriptions.
The party’s pledge purports to offer plans to cut federal spending, debt and taxes; to repeal and replace the Democrats’ health care reform; to create jobs; to reform and restore public trust in Congress; and generally to ensure that Americans and the nation’s military receive everything they need and nothing they don’t want.
Such promises, all without a serious foundation to construct a workable, common-sense platform, are unlikely to lure any but the most naive voter to the GOP’s side. They mainly represent a feeble attempt to trade on the tea-party movement’s rhetoric about “taking back our country” – a mantra that studiously avoids the issue of where the tea party and the GOP want to take the country back to.
Indeed, where precisely is that? Back to the depths of the Great Recession that cratered the economy in George W. Bush’s final six months, where 4 million jobs and trillions of dollars of household worth vanished in the financial implosion. Back to where vast tax cuts for the wealthy, two credit-card wars and the TARP fund, among other unpaid-for spending, doubled the federal debt in the Bush II era from $5.6 trillion to more than $12 trillion?
Those would not be good destinations. They comprise the black hole that is the source of much that troubles the nation today: deep joblessness from economic wounds and disassembled businesses that logistically defy quick revival; trade policies that give tax incentives to big corporations for outsourcing American jobs; runaway medical costs aggravated by price-gouging insurance and pharmaceutical companies that bitterly fought health-care reform’s new regulation.
President Obama aptly capsuled the premise of the “Pledge to America”: “They propose $4 trillion worth of tax cuts and $16 billion in spending cuts, and then they say we’re going to somehow magically balance the budget. That’s not a serious approach.”
His assessment is on target. The GOP promises to deeply cut the federal deficit and cumulative debt. Yet the party promises to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and add new ones for the corporate world. That proves Republicans aren’t serious about debt reduction, just as it exemplifies their favoritism for their rich individual and corporate campaign donors.
Democrats and Obama already propose to retain the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in January, for 98 percent of American taxpayers with family incomes below $250,000. These would cost $3 trillion over the next decade. The Republicans insist on adding the top-end tax cuts that benefit the top 2 percent of earners, mostly multi-millionaires, whom the Democrats would exclude. That would cost an additional $700 billion in the next 10 years.
The deficit this year, including part of the stimulus package, is $1.3 trillion. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense spending already consume 60 percent of the nation’s $3.5 trillion budget. Add in debt service and the margin for discretionary spending – and cuts in that spending – becomes mighty slim. Republicans don’t detail their spending cuts, but the $100 billion they typically propose to cut, a fraction of the current budget, would mainly sacrifice environmental, food safety and education programs. To go further, they would have to take on entitlements.
Republicans’ pledge to roll back health care reform is equally irrational. It would put insurers’ own care-denying death panels and price gougers back in charge of our health-care destiny, with no hope of either cost constraints or better health-care management practices.
None of their actual agenda would help restore trust and civility in Congress. Certainly their promise to do so – coming from their Party of No abuse of filibusters and legislative holds to thwart majority rule – has no credibility.
Voters may well feel tempted by such promises because the slog from recession has been so disheartening. The nation does need better service from Congress. But turning the reins of power over to the group that ran the country in the ground – and then resisted reforms finance and health care reforms and economic policies to revive the economy – won’t help us move forward. It would only take us backward to the scary depths of 2008.