We begin today’s roundup with an analysis of Republican economic plans by Paul Krugman at The New York Times:
It’s not too hard to understand why everyone seeking the Republican presidential nomination is proposing huge tax cuts for the rich. Just follow the money: Candidates in the G.O.P. primary draw the bulk of their financial support from a few dozen extremely wealthy families. Furthermore, decades of indoctrination have made an essentially religious faith in the virtues of high-end tax cuts — a faith impervious to evidence — a central part of Republican identity.
But what we saw in Tuesday’s presidential debate was something relatively new on the policy front: an increasingly unified Republican demand for hard-money policies, even in a depressed economy. Ted Cruz demands a return to the gold standard. Jeb Bush says he isn’t sure about that, but is open to the idea. Marco Rubio wants the Fed to focus solely on price stability, and stop worrying about unemployment. Donald Trump and Ben Carson see a pro-Obama conspiracy behind the Federal Reserve’s low-interest rate policy.
Daniel Drezner writing at The Washington Post:
Josh Mound at Salon:
For decades, Republican presidential candidates have proposed across-the-board cuts to federal income taxes. Like Reagan in 1980 or Bush in 2000, this election cycle candidates including Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have promised every American a tax cut, deficits be damned. Just as long as these plans have been offered, however, the distribution of Republicans’ proposed tax cuts – a fortune for the rich, a pittance for the poor and middle class – have made their true priorities clear. Conservatives have long accepted tiny cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers as the political price that has to be paid to give a populist veneer to the upper-income cuts they desire.
In recent years, however, many conservatives have embraced a new conviction, that taxes are too low on some Americans – the poor. As a result, some Republican presidential candidates are abandoning the idea of the across-the-board tax cut and proposing what might’ve once seemed unthinkable for the ostensibly “anti-tax” GOP – tax cuts for the rich combined with new or higher taxes on low-income Americans.
Jonathan Bernstein examines how Republicans would really run the Fed:
Based on what their candidates say in presidential debates, Republicans are now the party of tight money. Inflation, they say, is an enormous threat, and the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest rates low and pumping money into the economy risks disaster.
[...] In that respect, monetary policy is an issue, like health care, immigration and economic stimulus, where Republican policy appears to be mainly a reflexive instinct to oppose whatever Barack Obama supports. We don’t know how many positions they are taking now that will stick once Obama is off the scene, and especially if a Republican is in the White House.
At POLITICO, Michael Grunwald examines Republican rhetoric through the prism of the 2008 financial crisis:
Republicans don’t usually talk much about the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a reminder of the sour conclusion of the last Republican presidency. It’s a reminder that President Obama inherited an economy in a terrifying free-fall. And it’s a reminder of Republican opposition to Wall Street regulation and reform. [...] After all, the bank bailouts that helped fix the crisis also sparked the fury that helped launch the Tea Party—and GOP candidates buck the Tea Party at their peril. But the Wall Street reforms that Congress passed in 2010 are almost as popular with voters as Wall Street bailouts are unpopular, and the GOP candidates don’t support those either. It’s an awkward situation, and since the bailouts and reforms have both been surprisingly successful, the candidates often ended up in factual, logical and political cul-de-sacs trying to bash them.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:
The central issue facing most American families is that incomes, for all but the wealthy, are stagnant. The consensus response from the GOP field is a big collective shrug. [...]
What we did not hear Tuesday night was a plan to boost the earnings of middle-class workers. That’s the economic task of our time, but the Republican Party clearly wants no part of it.
On a final note, former conservative Damon Linker at The Week asks why conservative intellectuals aren’t more disgusted with the GOP:
I can't grasp how an intelligent, well-read man or woman, regardless of ideological commitments, could watch the Republican debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night and not come away disgusted. I certainly did. It was a familiar feeling. [...]
Somehow, my friends on the right don't seem to hear anything troubling, anything intellectually offensive emanating from the mouths of the Republican candidates. And I just don't get it.
The appropriate response to someone attempting to turn you into the victim of a hoax or a swindle is anger. It's insulting to be treated like a sucker, a chump. And yet, my conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least.
And that I just don't understand.