"For
heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes
saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you. He can’t murder
you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected
official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your
country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in
extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress."—Former US Senator Alan
Simpson, “I
Guess I’m a RINO”
When the current moment becomes history,
I suspect that historians will be as baffled as I am by the fact that 238
members of the House of Representatives and 41 Senators—all but three of them
Republicans—have signed something called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” in
which they promise that they will never (ever, ever) cast a single vote to
raise taxes. Given that “the power of the purse” is one of the most important
duties entrusted to Congress by the Constitution, the pledge they have taken
amounts to a solemn oath not to do their jobs.
Let me be very clear here. I am not
saying that the job of a legislator is to raise taxes. It is to determine,
by the facts available at a given moment, what the appropriate rate of taxation
should be. This is not an easy job; it requires a painstaking balancing of
different interests and potential consequences, which is why legislators get
large staffs, big salaries, and choice parking in downtown Washington DC to deliberate about such things. Nothing
shuts down the purpose of a deliberative body quite like an a priori declaration that you will not, under any circumstances, deliberate.
Anyone making an absolute and
unconditional promise not to ever vote to increase taxes must, of logical
necessity, accept one of the following statements: 1) that there will never
ever ever come a time when raising the tax rate is in the best interest of the country;
or 2) that something (i.e. campaign contributions, the political support of the
anti-tax lobby, etc.) is more important than doing what is in the best interest
of the country.
Since no politician will ever admit to
believing the second statement (as true as it might be), the only possible
grounds for signing the tax pledge is that one believes that there is NOTHING
that could EVER justify a tax increase, which is clearly an insane position to
take, our not being gods or having access to the future and all.
The
Founders—especially Alexander Hamilton—thought about this stuff quite a bit,
and they tried hard to design a system that would be capable of responding to
anything that the future might throw at them or us. In Federalist #34, Hamilton
argues that the government’s power to tax should be virtually unlimited because
the issues requiring a government response are impossible to anticipate:
We must bear in
mind that we are not to confine our view to the present period, but to look
forward to remote futurity. Constitutions of civil government are not to be
framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of
these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried
course of human affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to
infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government,
from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to
provide for future contingencies as they may happen; and as these are
illimitable in their nature, it is impossible safely to limit that capacity.
What is the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” if not a unilateral decision by an
individual elected official to limit the government's capacity to raise revenue
for an indefinite period of time? It assumes, not only that the government does
not need more revenue right now; it assumes that the government will never,
under any conditions, need more revenue. Such an assumption as Hamilton clearly
understood, is an abdication of the Constitutional responsibility to
govern.
Alan Simpson has apostatized from the
Republican Party to tell us that now would be a good time to consider raising taxes--and cutting spending--in order to reduce the deficit. There are some fairly compelling reasons
to listen to him. The federal tax rate is currently at its lowest point since
the end of World War II, and, not coincidentally, the deficit is higher as a
percent of GDP than it has been since 1947. Serious economists on both the left
and the right agree that we cannot manage the debt without raising taxes, and Americans
support modest tax increases for deficit reduction by a 2-1 margin. And
yet, as Simpson acknowledges, we will almost certainly not see any Republicans
voting to increase taxes any time in the near future because “Grover Norquist
won’t let them.”
The important question, now, is ours: why
do we keep sending people to Congress to do a job that they have signed a
written agreement not to do?
