Tax Adultery
I'll paste it here and then the op-ed afterwards. Buente sina hao muna'klaruyi hao hafa i sinangangan-na gi este:
“It is like a couple that is having a fight and one of them tries to drag a third party in. Like the preacher who gave a speech last week against adultery. ‘Hey, this is your fault!’ ‘No, no, no! You promised her you would behave, you didn’t promise me. You explain to her why you get to make decisions on adultery.’ ”
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Norquist’s Phantom Army
By TOM COBURN
Published: July 15, 2012
New York Times
WHEN the antitax lobbyist Grover G. Norquist
made a visit to Capitol Hill recently, leading Democrats welcomed the
chance to build up their favorite boogeyman. Harry Reid, the Senate
majority leader, said Mr. Norquist has “the entire Republican party in
the palm of his hand.” A spokeswoman for Nancy Pelosi, the House
minority leader, said Mr. Norquist — who is famous for getting lawmakers
to pledge
not to support tax hikes or deficit reduction that is paired with
revenue increases — was coming to give the G.O.P. its “marching orders.”
But this story is utterly false. Senate Republicans — and many House
Republicans — have repeatedly rejected Mr. Norquist’s strict
interpretation of his own pledge, a reading that requires them to defend
every loophole and spending program hidden in the tax code. While most
Republicans do, of course, oppose tax increases, they are hardly the
mindless robots Democrats say they are.
What the narrative does, however, is let Democrats off the hook. If they
can make out Republicans as uncompromising ideologues, they can
continue refusing to offer detailed plans to reform entitlement
programs. That is the real obstacle to a grand bargain on spending, not
Mr. Norquist’s pledge.
Consider the evidence: I recently proposed amendments to end tax earmarks for movie producers and the ethanol industry.
Mr. Norquist charged that those measures would be tax hikes unless
paired with dollar-for-dollar rate reductions. And yet all but six of
the 41 Senate Republicans who had signed his pledge voted for my
amendments.
Those 35 Republican pledge-violators are hardly soft on taxes. Rather,
they understand that the tax code is riddled with special-interest
provisions that are merely spending by another name. If asked to
eliminate earmarks for things like Nascar, the tackle-box industry
or Eskimo whaling captains — all of which are actual tax “breaks” —
most of my colleagues would be embarrassed to demand dollar-for-dollar
rate reductions, and rightly so.
As a result, rather than forcing Republicans to bow to him, Mr. Norquist
is the one who is increasingly isolated politically. For instance,
while his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, was calling my ethanol
amendment a tax hike, the Club for Growth, which is far more
influential among conservative lawmakers, endorsed my amendment outright.
What’s more, my colleagues have repeatedly rejected Mr. Norquist’s
demand that Republicans walk away from any grand bargain on the deficit
that includes even a penny of new revenue. Speaker of the House John A.
Boehner, who calls Mr. Norquist “some random person,” offered to trade revenue increases for entitlement reform in talks with the White House last summer. Republicans on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform made a similar offer, as did Senator Pat Toomey,
Republican of Pennsylvania, during last year’s deficit supercommittee
negotiations. My colleagues, by and large, know that doing nothing to
confront our fiscal challenges would mean an automatic tax increase and a
cut to entitlement programs.
The problem with the pledge is that it is powerless to prevent future
automatic tax increases and has failed to restrain past spending. The
“starve the beast” strategy to shrink the size of the federal government
by cutting revenue but not spending was a disaster. Every dollar we
borrow is a tax increase on the next generation.
And in a debt crisis, higher interest rates and the debasement of our
currency would be additional tax hikes. In that sense, no one is doing
more to violate the spirit of the pledge than Mr. Norquist himself, who
is asking Republicans to reject the very type of agreement that could
prevent future tax increases.
What unifies Republicans is not Mr. Norquist’s tortured definition of
tax purity but the idea of a Reagan- or Kennedy-style tax reform that
lowers rates and broadens the tax base by getting rid of loopholes and
deductions. It’s true that Republicans would prefer to lower rates as
much as possible, and it’s true that Republicans believe smart tax
reform will generate more, not less, revenue for the federal government.
But Republicans would not walk away from a grand bargain on
entitlements and tax reform that would devote a penny of revenue to
deficit reduction instead of rate reduction.
Free-market conservatives have repeatedly given openings to Democrats
that they have chosen to ignore. The president, for instance, knows that
his calls to raise taxes on earnings over $250,000, which follows his
gimmicky Buffett Rule, is a nonstarter unless paired with fundamental
tax and entitlement reform.
The majority of Democrats and Republicans understand the severity of our
economic challenges. They know they have to put everything on the table
and make hard choices. Legislators who would rather foster political
boogeymen only delay those critical reforms.
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