The Sam’s Club Agenda
Even though I’m a Republican, I’m not a big fan of David Frum.
That said, he is starting to make some sense lately about the future of the GOP. In his op-ed found in Friday’s New York Times, he sets up an interesting conversation among the three wings of the party. And what an interesting chat it is.
There is a lot of meaty stuff to glean from this op-ed, but what struck me was his take on the social conservatives:
Of course you can’t understand why we care about the marriage issue. You’re rich and secure and highly educated. The divorce rates for people like you have plunged since 1979. With your big new salaries up there, mothers can quit their jobs and stay home with the children — while your illegal-immigrant housekeepers make the beds. Down here, though, it’s still the 1970s. Our wages are stagnant. Both parents need to work, and those megachurches you laugh at provide the day care that makes it possible.
We can’t afford a single mistake. We need government to send consistent moral messages to offset the poison your Viacoms and Facebooks are dripping into our children’s minds.
You got a tax cut. We didn’t. That big increase in the per-child tax credit with which you garnished your big payday? We can’t use it. It’s only credited against income tax, and many of us don’t pay very much income tax. And even if we could use it, it usually gets clawed back by the alternative minimum tax. We are the party — but we’ve got little enough to show for it. It’s about time we ran it.
Being a gay Republican, I tend to have a pretty simple view about social conservatives. But Frum reminds me that some of their fears concerning gay marriage is not simple bigotry but also rooted in anxiety about their stagnating economic situation and a changing moral scene where marriages don’t last very long. It makes me wonder if some of the fears of gay marriage comes out of some sense of jealousy; why give support to two men, when straight families are hanging on by a thread?
Of course, none of this excuses some of the hatred concerning the issue; but it does help me understand it.
This economic anxiety also feeds into why Mike Huckabee has made such an impact.
While many liberals and quite a number of Republicans have focused on his anti-gay screeds, many have not noticed his economic populism, where he rails against the high pay of corporate executives and wants government to help poor and middle income Americans.
When it comes to economics, the GOP has been stuck on tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Cutting taxes can be a good thing and can be a needed shot in the arm, but they can’t be the only thing in the GOP’s economic quiver. In the 1990s, Democrats learned to move beyond simply tax and spend, and also focused on balancing the budget. Now is the time for Republicans to start disversifying their economic policies.
The GOP has been considered the party of economic opportunity. But that has not been the case during the Bush years. Frum (who has written a book on this issue) has written a brief summary on what the Republicans can do to help the middle class:
* universal health care provided by private companies via competitive markets;
* cuts in payroll – not income! – taxes for parents, to be financed by new taxes on energy use;
* lower taxes in saving and investment, higher taxes on consumption by upper-income Americans;
* tight restrictions on unskilled immigration;
* government action to support marriage, discourage single-parenthood, and fight obesity;
* an energy policy that supports nuclear power and discourages petroleum and coal;
* education reforms that include curtailment of racial preferences so as to prod minorities to higher performance;
* macroeconomic policies that focus on long-term growth: free trade, corporate governance reform, lower corporate income taxes, a higher dollar – without the special favors and individual breaks that yesterday’s Republican party lavished on K Street with shameful eagerness.
Some of this is an anathema to liberals, but it is also an anathema to conservatives-even though it is conservative in scope. I don’t agree with all of it, but it is a start. It would mean that the GOP would have to start seeing taxes in a more pragmatic way, raising them in some cases, lowering them in others. Look at where he focuses tax cuts: on payroll the tax that most working stiffs deal with on a daily basis, and not income which focuses on higher income. If Republicans truly believe that lower taxes spur growth, then we should be lowering taxes where it will really make a difference.
Reiham Salam wrote in post earlier this month that the difference between Democrats and Republicans when it came to the economy is that Democrats tend to be pessimists and the GOP are optimists. However, he believes (and I agree) that the Bush years have tarnished that image with incredibly dumb decisions on taxes and healthcare. Salam offers a message that he thinks the Republicans should be adopting:
The message I’d love to see Republicans convey is a populism that speaks to the head as well as the heart, that doesn’t condescend or make easy promises but rather tells uncomfortable truths: A free economy offer risks and rewards. Government can’t miraculously guarantee that you’ll only experience flush economic times, or that you’ll never experience a serious reversal. But what government can help you do is become more resilient, by designing the right mix of bankruptcy and immigration laws and savings vehicles and social insurance programs and taxes. America has always been known as a frontier society, as a country that gives people a second and third chance. We celebrate those who take a chance and fail, and then dust themselves off and try again. Fear of failure is the mark of a hidebound society We can’t let that happen to us. And we can’t bail out every bank and every hedge fund that flies too close to the sun.
I don’t know if the GOP candidates for president get this. But I think there is a groundswell happening that might just cause a revolution in how Republicans think about economic policy.
9 Responses to “The Sam’s Club Agenda”
Why is this anathema to some? Because it can also be read as “Subsidize 9 figure CEO salaries for health care corporations that deny benefits for the sake of profits. Refuse to negotiate drug prices so we can subsidize not research, but advertising that the big Pharma companies spend far more on than they spend on research (See Republican Medicare drug plan.). Continue to subsidize the system that has produced the problems we currently have with cost and lack of coverage.”. Gee, why would anyone have a problem with that?
Of course Salaam writes of something else.
The emphasis I added highlights the part that Republicans won't adapt to any time soon. They might do something just to be able to say they are doing something but won't extend it far enough to actually do any good. At least not any time soon. Say, any time while the current leadership or their “young Turks” in Congress still live.
What the author worked hard to avoid is any discussion about how unlimited immigration and the growth of minority groups has made blue collar whites much more apprehensive. White whites have the money and knowledge to avoid the negative impacts of unlimited immigration. Barack Obama's children to do not have to attend school with poor black students or the children of illegal immigrants. But blue collar whites have to struggle to avoid schools that are majority black or hispanic, to avoid minority-majority neighborhoods, or to avoid employers that are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic.
The GOP has been considered the party of economic opportunity.
You're joking right?!
The GOP has been and is the Party of Cheap Labor.
All of their economic policies have had the goal of driving down the cost of labor, they encourage Union Busting by not enforcing labor laws. They write laws to encourage outsourcing of jobs to third world countries, and keep raising immigration quotas (H1B & company). They have not been enforcing immigration laws and have let illegal immigration get totally out of hand . They have done everything they could to destroy the social safety net so that more people are forced into the labor pool.
Their policies have worked so well that median wages today are exactly what they were 30 years ago and that all the economic gains of the last thirty years have gone to the wealthiest 1% of the population.
SHARE OF NATIONAL INCOME GOING TO WAGES AND SALARIES AT RECORD
I'm no fan of Frum, either. I saw the book while on a road trip last weekend (I never go without having something to read when and where I stop) and knew even before I looked at some of it that I wouldn't like it. I wasn't “disappointed.”
What's overdue with the Republicans is a return toward constitutional federalism and a return to less, not more, government intervention in our lives and the economy. Minimalist government in Washington appeals to those of us who have been exposed too long to government ineptitude and misconduct, and to those of us who still respect the Constitution, and who are not ignorant of economics nor hooked helplessly or preferring to live parasitically on entitlements, subsidies, etc.
That is what is needed — real reform — but that would be misread even more by some on the Left than Frum's wrong-headed game-playing at reform that really isn't.
“All of their economic policies have had the goal of driving down the cost of labor.”
You are incorrect. However, some of their economic and political policies indeed seek this, effectively. The principal special-interest group of the GOP is the larger business community. (Big Business actually can deal with some Democrats as well as Republicans, for regulation of industry — we have far too much of it in this country — has the not-surprising coincidental effect of driving smaller competitors of Big Business out of the market. There is always a cartel threat associated with any kind of large-scale regulation of an industry.)
You are incorrect. However, some of their economic and political policies indeed seek this, effectively.
So basically I am correct!
What has lead you to believe that Republicans believe in free markets or small government?
“So basically I am correct!”
No. Far from all of what they have done has been to lower labor costs.
“What has lead you to believe that Republicans believe in free markets or small government?”
What has led me to believe that? Little these days, but there is a segment of the party that does seek that. I'll concede that in many cases (such as mine) there is no partisanship at all, but we're moderates who want to correct what Washington has done wrong, and so much of the time the Republican Party is the lesser of two evils in a far-too-large-for-far-too-long Washington. I don't see prospects any time soon of a return to federalism and Washington as a federal government, not a surrogate parent or collectivist nightmare “village.” Short of propriety I must settle for a strategy of damage control.
* * *
“unlimited immigration and the growth of minority groups has made blue collar whites much more apprehensive”
Well, some of this (not the unlimited immigration part, which need never be) is inevitable. Just recently there was a report on fake McCain-Land (the real such place is Washington), which is to say, Arizona. Population growth there (it is a healthy place, not an old Cyanide Nation people-and-job-exporting place; growth and the problems of growth are the normal state of affairs in the US's truly vital areas) mirrors growth overall in this nation.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/702/arizona-population
I posted this elsewhere but posting it here, too, is merited.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120121663246015…