A lot has been made over Jeb Bush's recent comments about taxes and spending, so much so that I thought he had proposed turning venture capital firms into kibbutzes or something.
Nope. Bush has made two statements, one against Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge and the other in favor of the 10-to-1 spending-cuts-to-new-taxes deal that every Republican candidate in GOP primary refused to endorse. Only one of them is anywhere near a moderate position in respect to his party.
That 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase (actually it's just closing of tax loopholes and deductions) would have been a Republican wet dream only a few years ago; now it's being turned down because any economic proposal involving revenue is basically socialism to the current GOP.
It goes without saying at this point that government spending cuts, especially at that level, disproportionately affect the poor, as they would take from unemployment benefits, social welfare programs, and health subsidies, not to mention infrastructure and transportation funding, reductions of which would be applied to the poorer communities long before we stopped fixing potholes on One Percent Ave. All this without taxing the wealthy any more than the already-reduced tax rate they currently pay, and you basically have an economic policy of upwardly redistributing wealth while balancing the budget on the backs of those who can least afford it. And that's the policy the GOP is turning down.
All of which is to say that Jeb Bush coming out in favor of the 10-to-1 plan hardly counts as apostasy, and he certainly doesn't deserve the pat on the back he's getting for being the reasonable, conciliatory conservative. Conor Friedersdorf, Atlantic's resident libertarian-type, called Bush "bold" for endorsing the plan, but there's nothing bold about a conservative endorsing an extremely conservative policy when his party happens to be 10 degrees more extreme.
Bush does deserve some props for bucking Norquist, who has what's starting to look like a mini-mutiny on his hands. Norquist's intractable anti-tax pledge is the reason no GOP candidate could sign on to the 10-to-1 deal: even closing tax loopholes is anathema to Norquist. This pledge was one of the primary forces responsible for the debt ceiling crisis last year, and for the congressional gridlock in general: so long as revenue increases are off the table, balancing the budget, let alone spurring economic growth, is impossible.
| RELATED: Republicans Bucking Grover Norquist's Anti-Tax Pledge |
But recently, a sizable chunk of new GOP congressional candidates are refused to sign the pledge, showing that Norquist's iron grip on the party is slipping. Now Jeb Bush is the highest profile GOP figure to publicly refuse it. If Bush's statement against the anti-tax pledge incites more conservative figures to buck Norquist, and encourages more congressmen to wiggle free from his control, Bush will have actually played a moderating role in his party.
Until such an event, though, let's cut it with the "bold Jeb Bush" nonsense.
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