Tag: Jonathan Chait

Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Why ‘Fix the Debt’ Just Can’t Quit Paul Ryan

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I concur with Jonathan Chait here: “Fix the Debt” has lost its way, and does not look like it will ever be able to find it again. People funding it and working for it should be well advised to go and find something else more productive to do with their money and time…

Jonathan Chait: Why ‘Fix the Debt’ Just Can’t Quit Paul Ryan: “Last week, House Republicans released a plan for a gigantic, regressive tax cut…

…Since gigantic tax cuts increase the budget deficit, you would think an organization devoted to the singular mission of reducing the deficit would oppose it. But no. The anti-deficit lobby Fix the Debt released a statement of qualified praise, which I ridiculed. Fix the Debt responds with a new, brief defense of its position. What its argument actually reveals is its denial about the state of the Republican Party. Here is the relevant portion of Fix the Debt’s response:

We don’t endorse the plan, but we do welcome it because it puts tax reform on the agenda in Washington. It also moves in the right direction by eliminating or limiting many of the tax breaks that complicate the tax code and shrink the tax base. Tax reform should contribute to deficit reduction, and definitely not increase deficits. We hope that the new plan will spur discussion and bipartisan negotiation on reform that will simplify the tax code, make the country more competitive, and help to fix the debt.

The nub of the argument is that the Republican plan, while admittedly imperfect, ‘moves in the right direction.’ But if you define the right direction as reducing the debt, then the plan doesn’t move in the right direction. It moves in the wrong direction. The Republican plan is for massive cuts in tax rates, including the complete elimination of the estate tax. It is true that the proposal gestures vaguely in the direction of closing loopholes and expenditures, but it does not define what these would be. What’s more, the plan’s authors have made clear that the proposal will be a net tax cut.

So how can Fix the Debt claim that a plan to increase the debt can ‘help to fix the debt’? It can only be understood as an extension of the organization’s dysfunctional enabling relationship…. During President Obama’s first term, anti-deficit activists came up with a plan that they hoped would induce Republicans to abandon their fanatical opposition to higher tax revenue. First, they would get Democrats to support cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of the trade. And second, the higher revenue would come not in the form of tax-rate increases but instead by reducing loopholes and [tax] expenditures…. In reality, Republicans refused to go for this deal. They didn’t just refuse once. They refused time after time. In 2010, the Simpson-Bowles commission came up with a plan that traded revenue-increasing tax reform for cuts to retirement programs, and leading Republicans like Paul Ryan all rejected the deal. Then, in 2011, Obama tried to strike a similar bargain with House Republicans when they held the debt ceiling hostage, but they rejected it again. That standoff led to the creation of a ‘supercommittee’ that was tasked with creating another version of the revenue-increasing tax-reform-for-retirement-cuts deal, which predictably failed again. And then, when the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of 2012, the Obama administration hoped the pressure of an imminent tax increase would force Republicans to make some version of the deal, but once again they refused, instead using their leverage to minimize the tax hit on upper-income households…. The debt-hawk theory on how Republicans could be induced to give up their fanatical opposition to higher revenue failed….

Conceding that this is the Republican position would subvert Fix the Debt’s entire theory of change. So instead the group continues to reside in a fantasy world where the GOP can be coaxed into doing the thing it has proven extensively it won’t do. In this fantasy world, a Republican using the words ‘tax reform’ means a step toward ‘discussion’ and ‘bipartisan negotiation’ and, ultimately, a result that would be the precise opposite of what Republicans actually want to do.

Must-read: Jonathan Chait: “Oh, Good, It’s 2016 and We’re Arguing Whether Marxism Works”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Oh, Good, It’s 2016 and We’re Arguing Whether Marxism Works: “[Tyler] Zimmer is articulating the standard left-wing critique of political liberalism…

…illiberal left-wing ideologies, Marxist and otherwise, follow the same basic structure… reject… free speech as a positive good enjoyed by all… conclu[de] that political advocacy on behalf of the oppressed enhances freedom, and political advocacy on behalf of the oppressor diminishes it.

It does not take much imagination to draw a link between this idea and the Gulag. The gap between Marxist political theory and the observed behavior of Marxist regimes is tissue-thin…. [The] party… [that is] the authentic representative of the oppressed… [can] shut down all opposition…. [And] Marxists reserve for themselves the right to decide ‘which forms of expression deserve protection and which don’t,’ [so] the result of the deliberation is perfectly obvious…

Must-read: Jonathan Chait: “Sorry, Conservatives, Obamacare Is Still Working”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Does Ross Douthat not understand that the “Cadillac Tax” is an essential part of every single Republican ObamaCare replacement plan? That while it is an important part of ObamaCare, it is not an essential part of ObamaCare? Or does he understand that element of the situation, but hope that his readers do not? Jonathan Chait reports. You decide!

Jonathan Chait: Sorry, Conservatives, Obamacare Is Still Working: “Ross Douthat’s Sunday column, as it so often does, offers the least unreasonable iteration…

…of the deranged state of conservative thinking on Obamacare. While no longer collapsing spectacularly, Obamacare is now sadly limping along in disappointing fashion, remaining just healthy enough not to expire…. The worst thing that’s happened to Obamacare is that Democrats have revolted against the Cadillac Tax. President Obama had to agree to delay the tax’s implementation for two years as part of the recent budget deal, in return for lots of good liberal policy (like tax breaks for green energy and low-income families). The Cadillac Tax would be in decent shape if Obama could just use his veto to keep it in place two years from now. The trouble is that Hillary Clinton, pressured by unions, has also come out against the Cadillac Tax. So now you have pro-union Democrats and anti-tax Republicans forming a coalition that looks like it can prevail starting in  2017, regardless of which party wins the election.

So, yes. Bad news for Obamacare, which looks like it has lost one of its many cost-control elements. But as bad as this news is for Obamacare, it’s absolutely catastrophic for Obamacare replacement. Every Republican plan to replace Obamacare relies on the same financing mechanism: limiting or repealing the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. The Cadillac Tax is a smaller, more painless version of this same policy. If both parties can’t abide a partial rollback of the tax break for the most expensive health plans, they’re never, ever going to go along with eliminating the entire tax break for all health plans. The conservatives cackling over the demise of the Cadillac Tax are delusional — it’s as if they’re watching the backlash against the Iraq War in 2008 with fingers tented, anticipating that this will encourage war-weary Americans to support a land invasion of Russia. The bipartisan support for maintaining the tax break for employer insurance will hurt Obamacare, but it can survive. The Republican plans to replace it would all be wiped out.

The Cadillac Tax debacle illustrates a crucial underlying reality of the politics of health-care reform: Change is incredibly difficult. That is why the United States staggered along for decades with a system that simultaneously spent far more per citizen than any other system in the world and cruelly denied treatment to millions. The compromises in the law are a function of this reality. Obamacare’s drafters could not draw up a blue-sky plan as though they were free to design the system anew. They had to work around an entrenched reality, making the system more humane and efficient without unduly burdening those who feared change. That they managed to pass and implement such a reform in the face of hysterical opposition is a historic triumph, one with which the opposition, five-and-a-half years later, has not come to grips.

Evening Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Piketty, Oligarchy, and Conservative Evasion

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Jonathan Chait: Piketty, Oligarchy, and Conservative Evasion: “Every so often, a right-winger billionaire will go on an epic public rant against class warfare, populism…

…and the depredations of the Democratic soak-the-rich tax agenda. But such rants are noteworthy not only for their hilarious lack of self-awareness and uncomfortable tendency to invoke Adolph Hitler, but for their sheer discordance with the rest of the Republican message. The GOP obviously does not want its public face to be filthy rich men wallowing in self-pity…. The sudden popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has again thrust conservatives into the pseudo-populist defensive stance…. David Brooks’s column today… a wilder essay/rant by Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti. Brooks (not for the first time) suggests that the liberal concern over inequality is driven by liberal elites, who are prestigious and wealthy, but less wealthy than the hedge-fund titans with whom they regularly interact, and against whose riches they bristle with resentment…. Continetti, meanwhile, brings up Piketty only to argue that the true oligarchs in America are the liberals…. What both have in common is a myopic focus on the sociological identity of Democratic elites…. In fact, American politics revolves around a policy dispute that carries massive repercussions for inequality…. Neither Brooks nor Continetti mentions any of these things. For all the demented paranoia of Tom Perkins, Ken Langone, Charles Koch, and the like, at least they are willing to acknowledge the basic class contours of the struggle in which they’re engaged…”