It’s easy to get sucked into simply gawking in disbelief at the repulsive train wreck the GOP has foisted on Americans this election cycle. There are so many shiny objects flying around, with vile insults now tossed as a matter of routine, entire voting demographics castigated and demonized, racist hate-mongering ginned up to a fever pitch, that one could be easily be forgiven for missing the man in the gorilla suit walking calmly across the GOP debate stage, like the one in this popular Internet video, titled “Selective Attention Test":
In the case of the Republican Party, the unseen gorilla is the fact that the Republican candidates, for all their chest-thumping and caterwauling about fiscal restraint and the evil of budget deficits, all eagerly promote policies which would push the country over a cliff into staggering debt, crippling the U.S. economy for generations. This is the underlying thread that connects all the GOP field, the one utterly ignored by a corporate media hopelessly transfixed and hypnotized by the circus sideshow. By treating the GOP debates as nothing but a sound-bite competition, the media have obscured what these folks’ economic “plans” for the rest of us really entail. But if any of these people is elected, they have every incentive—and a willing Congress—to execute the same destructive economic policies Republicans have always tried when they were permitted to be in charge.
Mike Lofgren is a recently retired Republican congressional aide who worked for the GOP on Capitol Hill for 28 years, serving on the House and Senate Budget Committees, among others. He is something of a GOP apostate, levelling criticism against his own party since departing the Hill, and authoring essays and books about how the Republican Party has been hijacked by the “Tea Party," whom he has described as “filled with lunatics." His work has appeared in Truthout, the Washington Monthly, and now, the New York Times.
In an op-ed published this Friday, Lofgren urges us to look past the sideshow and examine the implications of what these candidates are actually saying. Each one of them pledges his undying fealty to the god of deficit reduction, a pledge which Lofgren has found in his 28 years of Republican service to be an utter and complete fraud:
As a recovering Republican who retired in 2011 after serving on the House and Senate Budget Committees, I have concluded that this ritual denunciation of deficits and out-of-control spending is a fraud. Not only does the party not care about the deficit, but its practice since 1981 has been to worsen it.
As an example, Lofgren dissects the policy proposals of Marco Rubio, a so-called “establishment candidate”—as an exercise in showing just how ridiculous and hypocritical the Republican party line regarding budget deficits really is:
Since Mr. Rubio offers a detailed plan on taxes and spending — and since he is widely considered an “establishment” candidate — voters might carefully consider what his budget blueprint offers. Here’s the short version: It draws on fantasy math that would wreck America’s fiscal house.
The numbers being proposed by Rubio—who represents the same “Tea Party” Republicans in Congress who have held the budget process hostage during the Obama Administration and would have absolute control in the event of a Republican president—are fairly easy to understand, as are their ultimate consequences. For example, Rubio would eliminate all taxes on dividends and capital gains:
He almost went out of his way to concoct a policy that would benefit the richest Americans: 79 percent of current revenue from these two taxes comes from the top 1 percent of earners, and less than 10 percent from the bottom 95 percent.
He would also end the estate tax. Republicans invariably call this the “death tax,” insinuating that it hits everyone unfortunate enough to die. Not even close: Only about 5,400 estates in America owe federal estate tax for 2015. But getting rid of it would add about $300 billion to the deficit over 10 years.
Of course, the majority of people benefiting from a repeal of the capital gains tax are those who own large personally-held stock portfolios (not 401k’s). Lofgren estimates that repeal of this tax would cost the country one trillion dollars over ten years. Repealing the estate tax, while doubtlessly pleasing those 5400 super-rich families, would cost the country another $250 billion:
His entire tax package would increase the deficit by at least $4 trillion. But even Ramesh Ponnuru, a right-leaning columnist who approves of the plan, admits its price tag could be as high as $6 trillion (the plan incorporates highly optimistic economic assumptions).
(All links are from the original)
Just like Reagan ballooned the deficit with unnecessary military spending, Rubio has basically said he intends to prostrate himself before the military, pledging a new aircraft carrier group, more ground troops whose salaries and pensions we will be paying for decades, “nuclear modernization” (a $1 trillion effort), and a “missile defense system” costing hundreds of billions of dollars. All of this adds up to another $2 trillion over ten years at least—a complete waste of taxpayer money in an era of asymmetric warfare against tiny, backwards states. But he will get it, from a Republican Congress that has never shown any inclination to refuse anything the military asks for.
And Rubio’s “program” actually falls in the middle of what the other candidates are suggesting:
Mr. Rubio’s current fiscal plan is only in the middle range among the 2016 Republican contenders’ budget-busting schemes: Jeb Bush’s would add about $3.7 trillion to the deficit; Donald J. Trump’s, an eye-watering $12 trillion. Yet they all rail against what they call Mr. Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.
These numbers would create a gargantuan, historically unprecedented deficit that would then be used by the GOP as an excuse to wipe out this country’s ability to pay for Social Security, Medicare, every program benefiting the poor or disabled, all emergency aid to states for natural disasters, all transportation subsidies, or to repair and maintain every bridge and road in the country, which is exactly how Republicans have approached their so-called “fiscal restraint” mantra since the Reagan era. Is totally bankrupting our children’s future worth a mention by our cartoon media? Of course not. It’s apparently a lot less important than the fact that Donald Trump called Bill Clinton a “sexist.” Or stupid, petty squabbles about birth records and grandchildren.
Lofgren points to the wishful thinking, invented by the Reagan Administration’s budgeteers like the David Stockman, that created the “magic asterisk”—the idea that the huge deficits Reagan created would somehow be “imagined out of existence” by unspecified budget reductions in the future. Well, there’s really only one place to go to accomplish such cuts—Social Security and Medicare. The ultimate reduction and then destruction of these programs is what the Republicans’ phony budget fantasies are all about. Meanwhile, the idea of raising revenue through tax increases is, of course, completely off the map.
The truth is that all of these GOP candidates’ economic policies, combined with a proven irresponsible and ideologically inflexible Republican Congress, would cripple and probably destroy the U.S. economy for decades, wipe out any hope of progress for future generations and benefit only a tiny segment of the country's richest people. Yet the media have let them get away with this wholly fictional concern for “deficit reduction” year after year, decade after decade, and it appears this year will be no exception. Lofgren believes this is largely the product of public ignorance of the reality of the federal budget, and calculated, cynical Republican “framing:”
Republicans have been remarkably successful in delinking taxes from fiscal policy, “framing” taxes as a distasteful personal burden unconnected to widely desired public goods like roads, food-safety inspections or clean water. Instead, they claim that reducing taxes will spur so much investment the cuts will “pay for themselves.” Three decades of evidence have shown this claim to be false..[.]
As long as Americans continue to miss the gorilla sauntering through the Republican debate circus, the Republicans will be only too happy to continue pretending it doesn’t exist.