Ross Douthat engages in some counter-factual analysis in his piece today on the death of "The Grand Bargain:"I wrote that the president seemed poised to campaign for re-election on an essentially centrist policy agenda: A short-term payroll tax stimulus, a plan for tax reform that would close loopholes while lowering corporate rates, and a long-term plan for deficit reduction modeled on the grand bargain that the White House and John Boehner were supposedly close to striking during the debt ceiling negotiations. The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.
But the thing is that the Grand Bargain was not close to being struck. John Boehner may even have wanted to strike such a bargain, and in that case, Douthat may not be a roaring idiot, but that's not what matters in a constitutional democracy. The Congress was not going to pass that plan, and that's why Boehner's 'grand bargain' entreaties failed. He couldn't bring a grand bargain without being ousted from leadership.
Is there a value to this type of 'analysis?' It seems lazy to me, and stupid to boot. The burden of defense clearly lies on Douthat to prove anyone wrong here.
New rule of thumb: whenever you read a piece that mentions that a 'grand bargain' was 'close' this summer, just throw it out. It's trash, and very unlikely to engaged in meaningful, useful analysis anywhere else. The author is just too estranged from the realities of modern American politics.
There is a central problem in the way that self-identifying conservatives think about taxation. Here's a perfect example from Ross Douthat's piece in today's New York Times:
All we need to do instead is let taxes rise and keep on rising. This is how the “current law baseline” cuts the deficit: Thanks to inflation and bracket creep, its tax code gradually subjects more and more Americans to rates that now fall only on the wealthy.
Listen carefully to Douthat's complaint. "More and more Americans" will fall into the wealthy category, and they'll become more and more resentful of paying what they have asked others to pay. The assumption behind this attack on taxes is that Americans are a selfish, greedy people. Conservatives assume that the people who want more tax revenues from corporations, hedge-fund managers, and professional wealth inheritors are poor or at least have no aspirations to be wealthy.
"More and more Americans" amassing wealth is of course not Douthat's goal; it's a flaw.
This view of American economic possibility is shockingly stratified: if you're poor, you root against the rich. If you're rich, you have no reason to pay into a social safety net system because you'll always be rich. Douthat's analysis is proper in highly authoritarian, economically constrained societies. The American model of supposedly meritocratic capitalism has no place for this picture of calcified economic position.
If Douthat wanted to actually address how Americans are going to provide for their future, he should be spending his considerable resources of time and influence thinking about how we can make it easier for Americans to break into the wealthy strata.
