The GOP's All-in Gamble

Piggybacking on Ross Douthat's NY Times column today, Sullivan notes the GOP's inability to bring anything to the table on health care reform:

[Ross's piece] seems a pretty fair assessment to me although it doesn't absolve the GOP of abdicating all responsibility this year to place country before party. By that, I mean constructively engaging the process to improve the result rather than total oppositionism and partisanship. But that is also a function of the past many years as the GOP put Rovianism before any coherent governing philosophy and culture war before any real attempt to innovate policy or better understand government.

Right on. From 1993 to 2006, the GOP had ample opportunity to show America that they cared about helping uninsured Americans find affordable (or any) health insurance. No. Instead, they defeated Clinton's health-care package and then spent the rest of the time cuting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, deregulating the financial sector to the point of basically legalizing fraud and theft, trying to privatize Social Security so that the financial sector could get their greedy hands on the Soc Sec trust fund, and granting no-bid, multi-billion dollar contracts to Halliburton/KBR to usurp Iraqi oil supplies (epic fail there).

Don't paint me fiscally liberal; I'm down the middle all the way here. I hate paying income taxes and would love to pay less of them. But supply-side and trickle down do not work. Tax cuts for the wealthy don't make them put more money into the economy; the deregulation allowed them to move their money offshore and hoard it. Job creation was an afterthought. An example: under George W. Bush, with low taxes at the top end and for corporations cut to the quick, only 3 million jobs were created in his eight years (since the recession began we've lost over 7 million jobs in this country, wiping out any gains under Bush). Conversely, with higher taxes under Clinton, 23.1 million jobs were created. Lower taxes just don't solve all our problems.

Bruce Bartlett has it right: we need to raise revenue in this country and we need to do it in a big way. A Value Added Tax, while not progressive, would generate tons of money for this economy, and give the federal government ways to invest and keep businesses churning so that we can add jobs. The trouble is, liberals don't like it because it's regressive (i.e., because lower-income individuals use a greater share of their incomes for consumption, they pay a greater share of the VAT). And the conservatives are too weak and partisan to suggest anything that Obama can use to jump-start the economy in a successful way.

So basically what we have is a major political party that has gamble its entire existence on derailing Barack Obama. Smart move, I guess; they really have nothing to offer. But smarter people need to take the reins of the GOP before they gamble themselves into oblivion. And a single-party system is not good for America.