No, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. The Republican Party’s reform effort, which was heralded by a March, 2013, internal report that said that the G.O.P. was trapped in “an ideological cul de sac,” is over almost before it had begun. On issue after issue (gun control, immigration, gay marriage, Obamacare, climate change, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage), suggestions that the Party might revise its extreme positions have been stomped on. The ultras have won out. And nowhere is this more true than in the biggest policy area of all: taxes and spending.
At the end of February, Congressman Camp, who has been in the House since 1990, unveiled a tax-reform plan that would have lowered marginal rates, replacing the current system of seven tax bands with just three: ten per cent, twenty-five per cent, and thirty-five per cent. In order to keep revenues at their current levels, it would also have eliminated or trimmed back a range of deductions and loopholes, including some favored by corporations and the very rich. The Camp proposal contained some of the usual gimmicks, such as counting one-shot revenue gains as permanent ones, and it wasn’t exactly revenue neutral. But compared to previous Republican offerings it was a notably serious contribution, which was praised by centrist deficit hawks, and even by some liberal commentators. The bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that it “identifies many tough choices and trade-offs necessary for tax reform.” The economists on the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the proposal, in ten years, would raise the gross domestic product by up to 1.6 per cent.
What happened to Camp’s plan? It ran into heavy opposition from powerful constituencies aligned with the Republican Party. Hedge funds and private-equity firms objected to changes in the law that allowed Mitt Romney to classify much of his income from Bain Capital as “carried interest” and pay an effective federal tax rate of 13.9 per cent in 2010. Big oil and gas companies objected to a change in the accounting rules that would have prevented them from artificially lowering their profits, and their tax bills. Too-big-to-fail banks were apoplectic about Camp’s eminently sensible suggestion that, in return for the implicit subsidies that they receive from taxpayers, they should pay a small surcharge. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs threatened to put a fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee on hold.
In the face of this onslaught from its backers, the leadership of the G.O.P. quietly dumped the proposal in the Potomac, and Camp decided that he’d had enough. Like many East Coast and Midwestern Republicans before him, he appears to have concluded that the Party no longer has a place for pragmatists who put the national interest ahead of partisan wrangling and political purity. The future lies with true believers, and with ambitious conservative operators like Ryan, who, in one of history’s little ironies, is quite likely to replace Camp as the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.
Until then, the Wisconsin wonder will doubtless be out there promoting his new “Path to Prosperity,” the latest in a series of budget blueprints that he has put forward since 2008, when he released his original “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which proposed replacing Medicare with vouchers. At first glance, this iteration doesn’t look much different from the rest of them—except, perhaps, that its proposed cuts in outlays on welfare and other domestic programs are even more draconian. In a statement on his Web site, Ryan says that his plan would cut $5.1 trillion from over-all spending in the ten years after its implementation, and would eliminate the deficit while expanding the military’s budget. (To help make his numbers balance, he also relies on some very rosy economic projections.)
What is different now is the complexion of the G.O.P., which seems incapable of escaping from right-wing rah-rah land and returning to the center ground. Instead, it’s still moving toward the extremes. In 2008, Ryan’s economic plan attracted just six co-sponsors. Today, he has practically the entire Party behind him.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: JOHN CASSIDYbudge
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