The Republican Case Against Republican Voodoo Economics

One of the main economic mantras of the Republican Party is that cutting taxes somehow miraculously boosts the economy.  The approach hasn't worked for years now and, worse yet, it ignores the need to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure and the increased need for revenue to fund the needs of America's exploding number of senior citizens.  Sadly, being in touch with objective reality is not a trait of today's GOP which seems obsessed with doing nothing but prostituting itself to the Christofacists and unwashed masses of the Tea Party.  A column in the New York Times looks at the revolt among some conservative thinkers that are realizing the the GOP's economics is nothing less than voodoo economics and that change is needed.  Here are some column highlights:

After the 2012 presidential election, key Republicans began to criticize their party’s opposition to immigration reform and gay rights. But now party reformers are questioning something much more central: free-market orthodoxy.

In an article in the May 26 edition of The Week — “What conservatives don’t understand about the modern U.S. economy” — James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute has issued an economic challenge to the right from the right.

Pethokoukis’s piece is an assault on the economic manifesto that was put out on May 16 by a conservative group that included three icons of the right: Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, Senators from Texas and Utah, respectively, and Ed Meese, who served as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan.

“This tired GOP sequel stumbles in its macroeconomic analysis,” Pethokoukis writes, noting that the manifesto contains “no suggestion the economy faces longer-term problems that predate Obamanomics.” Pethokoukis argues that the manifesto’s anti-tax rhetoric fails to grasp that “coping with America’s rising elderly population will require a higher national tax burden in coming decades even with a reformed entitlement system.”

Pethokoukis is one of a number of conservative analysts who over the past three years have undergone something of an intellectual conversion. Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a Washington Post columnist, and Peter J. Wehner, also a Bush speechwriter and now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published “A Conservative Vision of Government” in the winter 2014 edition of the journal National Affairs. Their essay is an attack on the idea cherished by many Tea Party activists that all (or nearly all) government action and intervention is bad.

Gerson and Wehner criticize the domination of Republican economic policy by “rhetorical zeal and indiscipline in which virtually every reference to government is negative, disparaging, and denigrating.

Conservative reformers have sparked interest on the left, but some liberal commentators remain distrustful of the willingness of intraparty insurgents to seriously challenge Tea Party commitments.

E.J. Dionne Jr., writing in the most recent issue of Democracy, contends that conservative reformers on the right “are far too timid in their approaches to economic injustice and to the structural problems in the economic system.” Jonathan Chait takes a harder line in New York magazine: “The reformers are massively understating the obstacles before them. There are reasons Republicans have fought so hard to claw back subsidies for the least fortunate. Active philosophical opposition to redistribution is one. A general detachment from the poor is another. The unforgiving zero-sum math of budgets, which means a dollar spent on helping a Walmart mom is a dollar in higher taxes or lower defense or politically painful cuts in retirement benefits, is a third. I do think the Republican reformers can nudge their party to a better, or at least less terrible, place.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote that “the differences between white working-class independents and the GOP’s conservative base are becoming too substantial to ignore. The GOP base voter believes the deficit is as large a problem as the economy; the white working-class independent does not. The GOP base voter believes cutting entitlements is necessary to cut the deficit and that taxes on the rich should not be raised; the white working-class independent disagrees.”

Conservatism, as currently construed, faces the risk of irrelevance if it fails to address the consequences of globalization and automation, two of the most powerful forces driving the hollowing out of the middle class job market.

David Frum, still another former speechwriter for George W. Bush, was fired by A.E.I. in 2010 after sharply attacking Republican refusals to negotiate with Democrats on Obamacare in March of 2010. “We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat,” Frum declared. 

A major obstacle facing conservative reformers is the continued support for the Tea Party within Republican ranks. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans, and those who lean Republican, who agree with the Tea Party is three times larger than the percentage who disagree, 33 to 11, with 55 percent saying they have no opinion.

These hurdles leave reformers in a difficult position: to prove their case, they need their party to fail. A Democratic victory in 2016 would open the door for Republican insurgents and provide the kind of credibility essential in politics. But conservative mutineers cannot afford to be seen or heard rooting for defeat, even if that’s where their hearts lie.

I agree that only repeated failure at the polls may - and I stressed the word may - bring the GOP around.  Given the insanity and worship of ignorance which are the hallmarks of both the Christofascist and Tea Party, even losing repeatedly at the polls may not force them to accept objective reality.