You only get one main point. This is the first thing that I tell my Freshman Composition students every semester. They can make several arguments in their papers, but only one of them can be the main point--everything else has to somehow be subordinate. This is not just a silly little rule for English class. It is how reality works. Only one thing can be most important; that’s what “most important” means.
Most college freshman, I am happy to report, eventually get the message. Most congressional freshmen, on the other hand, do not. And this failure to understand how reality works has brought thelargest economy in the world to the brink of fiscal disaster.
Letme be more specific. The current Tea Party Freshmen have come into office intent on advancing two policy positions: 1) that we must reduce the out-of-control federal deficit; and 2) that we must not, under any circumstances, increase taxes. Bully for them. Both are legitimate political goals that reasonable people could assert as a priority.They can both be important. They can both be really, really important. But, as they are not identical, they cannot both be most important.
Information from the Congressional Budget Office, as represented in the chart on the left, makes it very clear that the Bush tax cuts (which the Republicans have prevented fromexpiring) have been the greatest single contributor to deficit increases since2002. This does not mean that tax cuts are bad. That is a statement of value. It means that tax cuts produce deficits. This is a mathematical fact. A deficit is simply the difference between what you take in and what you pay out. There are two ways to increase it: taking in less or paying out more. There are, similarly, two ways to decrease it: taking in more or paying out less. To someone whose “main point” is lowering the deficit, both options (tax increases and spending cuts) should be identical, as they both have exactly the same effect on the deficit.
If, on the other hand, you believe that cutting taxes (or not raising taxes, which is logically the same thing) is the most important thing, then you must accept the possibility ofhigher deficits. Even if you believe that the tax cuts will eventually stimulate the economy and produce more revenue, you still have to accept higher deficits in the immediate future—in exactly the same way that somebody who believes that spending increases will stimulate the economy has to accept higher deficits in the immediate future.
You can do both (cut taxesand decrease the deficit), but you can’t do both all the time, and, sometimes you will have to choose between doing one or doing the other.
It is fairly obvious from the negotiations that, for the new Tea Party freshmen, lowering (or not raising) taxes is more important than cutting the deficit. All of them, for example, have signed a pledge that they will never, under any circumstances, vote to raise taxes; they have signed no such pledge about the deficit. And when presented with a plan that would dramatically decrease the deficit with spending cuts and tax increases, they rejected it.
And let’s be very clear about this: the action that many Congressional Republicans are contemplating—allowing the US to temporarily default on its debt—would increase the deficit more than anything we could possibly do; it would drive our bond rating down, our interest rates up, and ensure that more of our taxpayer’s money would have to be spent paying interest on the current debt. From any standard of fiscal responsibility, voluntarily accepting higher interest rates (which is exactly what defaulting means) is stupid.
The actions show what therhetoric does not. The “main point” of the Congressional Republican Caucus—and especiallyof the Tea Party Freshmen—is “don’t raise taxes.” It is not “reduce the deficit.”
