Even if Republicans take the US Senate this year, gaining control of both houses of the US Congress, they will not gain much in conventional terms: They are already able to block legislation and they still will not be able to pass anything over the president’s veto. However, one thing they will be able to do is impose their will on the Congressional Budget Office, heretofore a nonpartisan referee on policy proposals.
As a result, we may soon find ourselves in deep voodoo.
During his failed bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, George H.W. Bush famously described rival Ronald Reagan’s “supply side” doctrine — the claim that cutting taxes on high incomes would lead to spectacular economic growth, so that tax cuts would pay for themselves — as “voodoo economic policy.” Bush was right. Even the rapid recovery from the 1981-1982 recession was driven by interest-rate cuts, not tax cuts. Still, for a time the voodoo faithful claimed vindication.
The 1990s, however, were bad news for voodoo. Conservatives confidently predicted economic disaster after then-US president Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike. What happened instead was a boom that surpassed the Reagan expansion in every dimension: GDP, jobs, wages and family incomes.
And while there was never any admission by the usual suspects that their god had failed, it is noteworthy that former US president George W. Bush’s administration — never shy about selling its policies on false pretenses — did not try to justify its tax cuts with extravagant claims about their economic payoff. George W. Bush’s economists did not believe in supply-side hype, and more important, his political handlers believed that such hype would play badly with the public. And we should also note that the George W. Bush-era Congressional Budget Office behaved well, sticking to its nonpartisan mandate.
However, now it looks as if voodoo is making a comeback. At the state level, Republican governors — in particular, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback — have been going all in on tax cuts despite troubled budgets, with confident assertions that growth will solve all problems. It is not happening and in Kansas a rebellion by moderates may deliver the state to Democrats. However, the true believers show no sign of wavering.
Meanwhile, US House Committee on the Budget Chairman Paul Ryan is dropping broad hints that after the election, he and his colleagues will do what the Bushies never did, try to push the budget office into adopting “dynamic scoring,” that is, assuming a big economic payoff from tax cuts.
So why is this happening now? It is not because voodoo economics has become any more credible. True, recovery from the 2007-2009 recession has been sluggish, but it has actually been a bit faster than the typical recovery from a financial crisis, despite unprecedented cuts in government spending and employment. In fact, the recovery in private-sector employment has been faster than it was during the “Bush boom” last decade. At the same time, researchers at the IMF, surveying cross-country evidence, have found that redistribution of income from the affluent to the poor, which conservatives insist kills growth, actually seems to boost economies.
However, facts will not stop the voodoo comeback, for two main reasons.
First, voodoo economics has dominated the conservative movement for so long that it has become an inward-looking cult, whose members know what they know and are impervious to contrary evidence. Fifteen years ago leading Republicans may have been aware that the Clinton boom posed a problem for their ideology. Today someone like US Senator Rand Paul can say: “When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan.” Clinton who?
Second, the nature of the budget debate means that Republican leaders need to believe in the ways of magic. For years people like Ryan have posed as champions of fiscal discipline even while advocating huge tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. They have also called for savage cuts in aid to the poor, but these have never been big enough to offset the revenue loss. So how can they make things add up?
Well, for years they have relied on magic asterisks — claims that they will make up for lost revenue by closing loopholes and slashing spending, details to follow. However, this dodge has been losing effectiveness as the years go by and the specifics keep not coming. Inevitably, then, they are feeling the pull of that old black magic — and if they take the senate, they will be able to infuse voodoo into supposedly neutral analysis.
Would they actually do it? It would destroy the credibility of a very important institution, one that has served the country well. However, have you seen any evidence that the modern conservative movement cares about such things?
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