Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (71 page)

Injecting the conservative movement with some bracing doses of realism has been the reform conservative movement’s greatest contribution. Yet Walter Mondale’s old question applies: Where’s the beef? Do the ponderings of the Reformicons have any resonance among Republican politicians who write budgets and pass laws? And are reform conservatives really willing to challenge them? So far, the results have been less than overwhelming.

Although there were exceptions, it’s significant that the reform conservatives were not, on the whole, sharply critical of the steep cuts in both taxes and spending that House Republicans repeatedly proposed after 2010. Indeed, most reform conservatives consider Paul Ryan, the architect of the cuts, an ally. Levin, for example, praised the new Republican Congress in 2012 for having
“put a stop to the explosion of liberal activism that characterized President Obama’s first two years in office” and in particular Paul Ryan’s budgets for managing “to restrain the growth of spending.” In one sense, Levin was simply being who he is, a conservative. But his stance suggested that he and his colleagues were operating largely inside the existing conservative consensus. The Reformicons were far less willing than Clinton’s New Democrats to challenge their own side’s orthodoxy.

Rubio, who emerged as one of the strongest Republican presidential contenders and is close to the Reformicons, has received credit for facing some of the facts about inequality and obstacles to mobility.
“Our modern-day economy has wiped out many of the low-skill jobs that once provided millions with a middle-class living,” Rubio said in a January 2014 speech. “Those that have not been outsourced or replaced by technology pay wages that fail to keep pace with the cost of living.”

Fair enough. Then what? Rubio dismissed the importance of raising the minimum wage, arguing that “having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American Dream.” Perhaps not, but it’s $2.75 closer than $7.25 an hour.
We need to foster more growth, Rubio said as he offered conservative boilerplate: concern about our “dangerous and growing national debt,” support for a “tax code that incentivizes investment,” and criticism of “regulations that prevent employers from expanding.”

Rubio’s approach reflects the Reformicon focus on culture and family issues. A child born into a broken family, living in a bad neighborhood, and attending a dysfunctional school, he said, “is, in all likelihood, not going to have the same opportunity to succeed as a child growing up in a stable home, in a safe neighborhood, and attending a good school,” Rubio said. Yes, and then what?

Rubio’s big ideas include turning “Washington’s anti-poverty programs—and the trillions spent on them—over to the states” and creating a “revenue-neutral Flex Fund” out of the proceeds. He has also called for replacing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) with a federal wage enhancement for qualifying low-wage jobs that “appl[ies] the same to singles as it would to married couples and families with children.”

Rubio’s “Flex Fund” idea was just a super block grant, harking back to Reagan’s 1976 proposal for devolving responsibilities to the states, which helped Gerald Ford beat him for the nomination. Moreover, as
Sharon Parrott of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, his approach threatens to obliterate the role of various entitlements as automatic economic stabilizers during downturns. And block grants are invitations to future cuts. It’s much easier to rally opposition to throwing large numbers of children off food stamps than to cutting a big, abstract number.

As for Rubio’s plan to replace the EITC, it was a form of progress that he and other reform-oriented conservatives were endorsing income transfer programs that Republicans in Congress had tried to cut. And he was right that the EITC is insufficiently generous to single workers without families. One person who agreed with him on this is President Obama, who has included an expansion in his budgets.

But then there was the question of financing. Unless Rubio planned to spend much more on his wage program than was spent already on the EITC, Parrott noted, “his proposal would have to dramatically cut the earnings supplements that the EITC now provides to low-income working families
with children.” Thus did Rubio’s policy contributions underscore one of the Reformicons’ core difficulties: even when they acknowledged that there are problems that only government can solve, they have been reluctant to put enough money behind their responses to make a material difference.

This may be because many of the reformers still want to cut taxes—a lot. A 2014 tax plan that Rubio introduced with Senator Mike Lee was estimated to cost $2.4 trillion over a decade, substantially more than the Bush tax cut. Rubio’s 2015 reworking of the plan for his campaign was even broader in its scope, to the point where the liberal Citizens for Tax Justice estimated the plan could
add an astonishing $11.8 trillion to the debt.

Rubio and Lee’s proposal could hardly have been more generous to the wealthy. It not only ended taxation of capital gains, dividends, and interest, but also eliminated the estate tax, now paid only on very large fortunes. It cut the business tax rate to 25 percent and included a variety of other benefits for companies. This is classic supply-side tax cutting. The proposal’s major bow to reform conservative concerns was a new $2,500 per Child Tax Credit. Rubio’s plan was especially parsimonious in its benefits to the middle class.

As the liberal writer Jonathan Chait noted,
“The new Rubio-Lee plan would surpass anything George W. Bush or Mitt Romney ever proposed to do in its ambitions to relieve the richest Americans of their tax burdens.” Noting that reform conservatives such as Ponnuru and Levin had enthusiastically praised the plan, Chait wondered what this said about the movement’s real objectives. “Perhaps the reform conservatives have capitulated completely in the name of party unity,” he wrote. “Or maybe they were misunderstood from the beginning and never proposed to deviate in any substantive way from the traditional platform of massively regressive, debt-financed tax cutting.” Chait’s critique raises once again the central question the reformers have still not answered: how much does their approach represent any real break with the conservatism of the last twenty-five—or fifty—years? Ponnuru, at least, diplomatically recognized that the more costly campaign version of the Rubio plan—he put the price tag at $6 trillion—went
“too far in the right direction.”

Jeb Bush also had ties to the reformers and his willingness to court opposition from the Republican base, mentioned earlier, was reciprocated. His
support for immigration reform and his defense of the “Common Core” education standards (once supported by many conservatives but later relabed by the right, unsurprisingly, as “ObamaCore”) were his most obvious deviations. Yet
the detailed tax proposal he issued in September 2015 was orthodoxy itself, signaled by his decision to unveil it in an op-ed piece for the
Wall Street Journal,
whose editorial page is the home church for supply-side economics. Bush tried to cast the plan as populist because it eliminated some tax loopholes, but it was plainly the opposite. Its key features included cutting the top income tax rate from 39.4 percent to 28 percent and eliminating the estate tax. The Tax Foundation concluded that the top 1 percent of earners—those making more than about $406,000—would see their after-tax incomes increase
on average by 11.6 percent, even as the average increase for all income levels would be only 3.3 percent. Bush’s critics gleefully noted that Jeb Bush’s plan would be especially beneficial to Jeb Bush. The liberal Center for American Progress estimated that Bush’s plan would cut
his own taxes by $773,677 while
Washington Post
columnist Catherine Rampell figured Bush’s windfall at $789,137. As for Donald Trump, he talked a good game on tax fairness, but his actual plan was very generous to best-off.

The fact that Republicans never tried to pass an alternative to Obamacare is also a commentary on reform conservatism’s limits. Levin himself had focused on health care when he worked in George W. Bush’s administration and he regularly made proposals designed mainly to reduce government’s role in health insurance regulation and focusing on tax credits. Two Republican presidential candidates who put out the rudiments of health care plans, Scott
Walker (before he dropped out) and Rubio, both proposed to turn Medicaid into a block grant, hardly an innovative proposal (and one that would over time almost certainly reduce spending on health insurance for the poor). Both, as the
New York Times
reported, favored
“a much less regulated insurance market” and were “much less concerned about ensuring health care access for the poor.” Both favored tax credits to help people buy insurance, which, of course, is a central part of Obamacare. But Walker based his credits on age rather than income. The impact of this difference was clear. Walker’s plan “would tend to work out well for some middle- and upper-income people, because right now they don’t qualify for much—or any—financial assistance
for the government,” wrote health care analysts Jeffrey Young and Jonathan Cohn. “But less affluent people would lose assistance, to the point that large numbers of Americans would no longer be able to afford comprehensive coverage at all, and those who
could
afford it would face much more punishing bills.” Once again, conservative redistribution would go upward.

CNBC’s John Harwood confronted Walker directly on the issue. “Given the trends of income disparity in the country,” Harwood asked, “why is this the right time for that kind of redistribution?”

Walker’s reply did not deny the redistributive impact of his plan. He just declared it a nonproblem (“It’s not about a redistribution of wealth issue”) and fell back on the conservative ideological boilerplate. “Our system’s purely about freedom,” he said. “It’s about giving people the freedom.” Including, it would appear, the freedom not to afford health insurace.

Similar critiques applied to Rubio’s plan, which continued to raise the question: why are the Republicans the only conservative party in any of the wealthy democracies to oppose a universal guarantee of access to health insurance? And why, in particular, has the success of Mitt Romney’s health care effort in Massachusetts not made his approach more attractive to the wider conservative movement? The obvious answer: Obamacare is too much like Romneycare.

The closest political ally of the Reformicons before his primary defeat was Eric Cantor, and his unsuccessful foray into health care politics was an indicator of just how toxic that issue is on the right. In 2013, he gave a speech entitled
“Make Life Work” in which he was unusually explicit for a conservative in acknowledging government’s responsibility “to ensure [that] every American has a fair shot at earning their success and achieving their dreams.”

Cantor brought to the House floor one of the proposals from his speech. It would have transferred money out of the Affordable Care Act’s disease prevention account to pay for high-risk pools for Americans who had difficulty obtaining regular insurance. He lost. Conservative Republicans did not want to cast any votes that might be seen as even indirectly endorsing Obamacare. Cantor’s defeat on an idea that by any fair reading was intended to undercut Obamacare raised once more the fundamental problem facing Reformicons: they could come up with all the new policy they wanted, but as long as
congressional Republicans remained locked into obstruction and opposition, even repackaging—let alone rethinking—was in danger of remaining an isolated project championed primarily by a few intellectuals and journalists.

Their great hope was that Republican presidential candidates, including Rubio and Bush, could champion reform ideas in the 2016 presidential campaign, much as Bill Clinton had championed the New Democrat project in 1992. But the reform conservative ideas were hardly catching fire among Republican voters. At least in the early going, the energy in the contest was with outsiders far removed from, and even disdainful of, Washington’s policy deliberations. And one of them was especially loud.

Donald Trump did not make his mark with tax credits or education reform proposals or bold ideas to balance the budget. He did it by trashing Mexicans and endorsing the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. No worries about whether getting 11 million people out of the country would be complicated, let alone cruel. He told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos: “George,
it’s called management. . . . They would be out really fast, immediately.” He said he’d build a border wall with Mexico—and make Mexico pay for it.