I've been closely following the debate surrounding Jon Chait's book (excerpted in The New Republic) about the rise of supply side economics and the cranks behind it. The debate fascinates me for a few reasons. For starters, Chait is my favorite columnist out there right now. He also went to the most important college ever. more importantly, the debate has provided an interesting view into the mind of conservatives like McMegan and Grover Norquist. The Norquist bit is particularly interesting, because he's remarkably up-front about the motivations behind much of conservative rhetoric behind tax cuts, and what he says provides a window into the operation of the current Republican movement as a whole.
I should start by saying that I have no trouble giving Norquist some credit for intellectual honesty on this issue. I do think he firmly believes that small government is a good thing in and of itself, and that cutting taxes is the best way to starve the beast. The article is also funny and witty, which always gets points from me.
It's also to Norquist's credit that he never tries to defend the The Laffer Curve or supply-side economics (the idea that cutting taxes will give people incentives that create more wealth, and will actually increase revenue). This is good, because no serious economist actually believes that the Laffer Curve is an accurate model of the world. Evidence just doesn't suggest that cutting taxes magically leads to more revenue.
As I've mentioned, Norquist doesn't try to defend this idea. He doesn't even mention the Laffer Curve in a piece responding to a book about the Laffer Curve. But he does make a few statements that are helpful in illuminating why supply side arguments are so popular among Republican politicians in the first place.
I came up with the idea of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge when I was in high school. (Implementation had to wait till later.) We were told that most citizens didn't know the name of their congressman. Campaigns spent millions on name ID. What if we could brand the GOP as the party that would not raise your taxes? Then a voter could enter the polling place dead drunk and know that if he or she simply pulled the R lever they at least would be protected from tax hikes. Branding is what allows us to buy Coke bottles without demanding a taste or asking friends about the virtues of this Coke bottle or reading the label. We know what is inside. There is quality control and consistency.
That is, I think, a fair distillation of much of the current Republican attitude toward policy. Not "is it good policy?" or "does it even make sense?" but, "what effect will it have on the polls?" This piece dovetails nicely with Joshua Green's recent (subscription only) article in The Atlantic about Karl Rove's attempt to effect a permanent realignment of American politics. Rove chose 5 issues; education, faith-based initiatives, Social Security privatization, HSAs and immigration reform.
Again, I'm willing to give Rove and the Bush Administration a decent amount of credit; I do think they believed in these goals. But, in Green's telling, there was a larger purpose at play that made the policy analysis almost secondary to the politics of the thing. Rove believed that each one of these issues could peel off a core Democratic constituency and cement Republican control of national politics. Education reform would end the traditional Democratic dominance over the issue. Faith-based initiatives would mollify religious voters more concerned with poverty and suffering than abortion and gay marriage. HSAs and Social Security privatization would eviscerate some of the most popular programs Democrats have ever enacted, and immigration reform would bring the fastest growing bloc of voters into the Republican camp.
It's a sign of how central Rove's grandiose notions of realignment were that some of these ideas weren't particularly well thought-out. Social Security privatization and Health Care reform, in particular, were ad hoc attempts that produced bad policy. For all the criticism of HillaryCare, the Clinton Administration at least took the policy aspect of it seriously, producing a maddeningly complex program to deal with all the concerns. The Bush Administration couldn't be bothered to confront the problems at all, because it was the political effect of the programs, not the policies themselves that they really cared about.
Now, two articles are hardly convincing proof of an overarching ideology, but I do think these articles are telling nonetheless. I've never really bought that important movement conservatives or members of the Bush Administration are evil or nefarious. It's simply a group dominated by men and women who see politics before policy to an extent that's unusual even for Washington. They may, and probably usually do, believe in the policies their putting forth, but any sort of analysis of whether those policies are sound takes a back seat to what those policies will do at the ballot box. Grover Norquist was just honest enough to admit it.