The tea party succeeded in the battle over taxes — and ideas.
By Marc A. Thiessen
The tea party came under fire Friday after House conservatives nearly brought down Speaker John Boehner’s debt-limit bill. John McCain went to the Senate floor to mock tea partyers as “hobbits,” and Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen said tea party Republicans “are unfit for governing.”
What a difference a weekend makes. The reported debt-limit deal appears to be a victory for the tea party. It includes about $1 trillion in spending cuts and creates a special committee of Congress to recommend cuts of $1.2 trillion more. If Congress does not approve those additional cuts by year’s end, automatic spending cuts go into effect. The package sets an important new precedent that debt-limit increases must be “paid for” with commensurate cuts in spending. According to Sen. Rob Portman, a former White House budget director, if we cut a dollar of spending for every dollar we raise the debt limit, we will balance the budget in 10 years — something that even the Paul Ryan budget would not achieve. And all this with no tax increases.
To appreciate the scope of the tea party’s victory, consider: When Barack Obama came into office, he went on a bender of government spending. He signed an unprecedented $821 billion stimulus spending bill. His first budget increased federal spending to 27 percent of gross domestic product — the highest level as a share of the economy since World War II. He then proceeded to ram through Congress Obamacare that adds $1.4 trillion in new spending during the next decade alone. And five months ago Obama submitted a budget to Congress that tripled the national debt, raising it by $10 trillion during the next 10 years.
Today, no one is talking about tripling the national debt. Congress is about to cut spending by about $2 trillion and put us on a trajectory to balance the budget within a decade. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid complained Saturday evening that Congress has raised the debt limit 74 times since 1962 without conditions. He is right. This is happening for the first time in history, thanks to the tea party.
Consider that a week ago, Obama addressed the nation, demanding that Congress include higher taxes in any deal. The tea party took tax hikes off the table and held the line — another major victory.
The tea party also is winning the battle of ideas. Last week, Obama strategist David Axelrod crowed that the debt-limit battle was shaping up as a “definitional fight” in which voters would see Obama as defending the reasonable center against Republicans who are “pandering to the extremes.”
Instead of winning over independents with his calls for a “balanced” approach, the president’s support among independents has collapsed. A Pew poll released last week found that a majority of independents now disapprove of Obama’s job performance for the first time in his presidency. Two months ago, Obama held an 11-point lead over a generic Republican. Today, that lead has vanished.
Some tea party Republicans will be unhappy because the deal does not include a balanced budget amendment. The fight for a balanced budget amendment must go on. But tea partyers should recognize just how much Obama and the Democrats caved: $2 trillion in spending cuts. No tax increases. A new precedent that debt-limit hikes must be accompanied by equal or greater cuts in spending. And the potential for a balanced budget in 10 years. That the tea party accomplished all this in six months — at a time when the GOP controls one-half of one-third of the federal government — is remarkable. The “hobbits” won.
Marc A. Thiessen is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush.
The modest deal ensures no new investments in jobs, infrastructure and the economy.
By Matt Miller
So this is what we’ve driven the global economy and America’s credit rating to the brink for? This is why Republicans (who voted for the Paul Ryan plan that would add $5 trillion in red ink during the next decade) decided it was vital to not lift the debt ceiling to accommodate their own budget’s outsized debt? This is the best the White House could salvage after inexplicably failing to insist that the debt ceiling be raised as part of December’s deal to extend the Bush tax cuts — which would have let the country avoid this unprecedented exercise in self-inflicted damage?
If you put aside the talking points both sides will peddle, the disappointing contours of the emerging endgame run as follows:
First, Washington will do nothing more to boost jobs and growth. The best that can be said is that the spending cuts will be tiny in the next two years, so the feds won’t be contracting demand, save for the end of the stimulus. Our epic jobs crisis remains ignored.
Next — as to long-term deficit reduction, supposedly the reason the GOP put the country through this costly fiasco — the deal remains utterly inadequate, even if the joint congressional committee the plan would empower to address this succeeds.
Here’s why: The Congressional Budget Office says Uncle Sam will spend about $46 trillion during the next 10 years. Assume the committee proposes and Congress enacts a further $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction atop the deal’s $900 billion in initial cuts, and that all this is done on the spending side (though “tax reform” is supposed to be included). That means we’ll have trimmed less than 6 percent from federal spending that already is slated to increase from $3.6 trillion to $5.7 trillion by 2021.
In other words, the numbers sound big and can be sold as “historic,” but they’re not even close to what’s needed.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had it right Sunday. “It’s a $3 trillion package that will allow $7 trillion to be added to the deficit over the next decade,” he said, instead of $10 trillion. “We’re no longer running toward oblivion, we’re walking toward it.”
Politically, however, it’s a sufficient escape hatch. The tea party can claim it changed the debate. Other Republicans can say “this is the best we can do without the presidency.” President Barack Obama can tell independents he got “a major down payment on deficit reduction” while still casting the GOP as unreasonably opposed to fair tax hikes on hedge fund managers, oil companies and corporate jet owners.
And the president got the only thing that was ever nonnegotiable from his perspective: a big enough increase in the debt limit to ensure he doesn’t have a repeat of this fiasco during the 2012 campaign, which would make him look fatally weak.
As for the infamous “trigger” meant to assure the joint committee does its work? I’m told the cuts from any sequester it imposes for failure won’t take effect until January 2013 — about the time the Bush tax cuts expire. So it’s not clear the long-term parts of this deal will have any impact, because we’ll be revisiting everything after the election, with whatever cast of characters is sent back to Sodom to do the people’s work.
Taken together, then, the deal is an almost perfect blend of policy punt and political ploy. That’s what passes for “accomplishment” in Washington nowadays.
The media will now parse the byzantine details and the mechanics of passage. But the depressing big picture is this: We’ve averted disaster only to double down on decline.
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio’s “Left, Right & Center.”
