What Is the GOP and Where Is It Going?

 

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been treated to a circus in the House of Representatives, which, as the saying goes, is an insult to the circus. The circus, of course, is a lot better organized than the Republican caucus. But what Speaker Roulette has revealed is the numerous divisions in the GOP. As the events unfolded, a significant split appeared between the MAGA faction and the traditionalists. I don’t call them moderates, because there is no such animal as a moderate in today’s GOP. But several of the older, more senior members of the caucus refused to support legislative arsonist Jim Jordan. This split may have been more personal than ideological, however, since the traditionalists all later fell in line behind election denier and extremist Mike Johnson, who, from all reports, is just a kinder, gentler version of Jordan.

For a while it appeared that the traditionalists might just accept the Democrats’ offer to put a more moderate and reasonable Speaker in place who would allow bipartisan legislation to reach the floor. But that was apparently a bridge too far for even the old guard. So, given who is in control of the party at this point, I fully expect the House Republicans to make impossible demands, pass message bills that have no chance of getting through the Senate or a presidential veto, and shut down the government.

One thing is certain, however, and that is the fact that the Republican Party is not interested in governing. They are genetically wired to hate the very government they seek to “lead.” They are interested in power only, not in any good they might accomplish with that power. Consequently, the GOP is much more adept at being the minority party, where they don’t actually have to lead or deal with complex issues. Asking them to compromise and pass legislation that, while imperfect, would actually benefit the majority of America is too much.

Most Republicans in Congress are more interested in playing to the base and getting their faces on Fox News than in doing their job. And what is that job? Compromise. That is the nature of our constitutional republic. America does not have a parliamentary system, in which the team that wins the most seats gets to also pick the governing executive and implement their policies unimpeded. Our Founders instead established a government that, by design, requires the parties to work together to a degree, especially when power is divided as it is now, with one party controlling the White House and the Senate and the other party controlling the House.

Kevin McCarthy lost his gavel, ironically, because he understood this. He avoided a default on the debt and avoided a government shutdown because he understood that he couldn’t just make one-sided demands and expect both the Senate and President Biden to cave. The Democrats and McCarthy both knew that if there was a government shutdown, most Americans would rightly blame the Republicans. But there is a small (or maybe large) contingent of Republicans in the House who don’t understand our government. Compromise is not in their vocabulary. So they forced McCarthy out. Of course they tried to blame it on the Democrats because none of them voted to save McCarthy, but McCarthy had given them no reason to support him.

And this was McCarthy’s main weakness. Nobody could trust him. After January 6, 2001, for instance, McCarthy correctly blamed Trump for the insurrection. But then he reversed himself, crawled to Mar-a-Lago, and kissed Trump’s ring. This is symbolic of his entire speakership. Once the GOP gained the majority in the House, it took 15 votes before McCarthy finally made enough concessions to the extremists in his party that they would allow him to squeak into the Speaker’s office. But he broke his promises to them when he made two deals with the Democrats to keep the government running. Then, trying to make the extremists happy, he went back on much of what he had promised Biden and the Democrats, including allowing the “Freedom” Caucus to open impeachment hearings on Biden without any substantial evidence. So, McCarthy is not a figure to pity. He deserved what he got.

And so did the Republican Party. The circus that followed demonstrated to all America just how broken the GOP is and just how unfit Republicans are to hold any sort of power. To their credit, the traditionalists did not hand the Speaker’s gavel to Jim Jordan, one of the most corrupt politicians we’ve seen in ages. But they also didn’t have enough support to make anyone Speaker who was not an extremist and election denier. So we now have Mike Johnson, and I really have few doubts about what we are about to endure. If he tries to keep the government from shutting down, which he can’t do without compromising and without Democratic votes, he will go the way of McCarthy. But if he does shut the government down by making impossible demands, the GOP will get most of the blame for the significant damage they will inflict on individual Americans and on the government. He’s really in an impossible position. So, good luck, Mike.

What the Republican Party needs to do is figure out what it really is. Right now, it has no clue. Mitt Romney has expressed a few opinions in his new biography. According to his biographer, McKay Coppins, Romney told him that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” This should come as no surprise, since a majority of the party still believes Trump won the last election and does not think he has committed any crimes. The Republican Party, by and large, is so addicted to disinformation, conspiracy theories, and corruption that they have no use for the Constitution.

What are we to make of a party consisting largely of white evangelical christians (yes, I lowercased that intentionally) who, when polled, think that a serial adulterer, confessed sexual predator, business fraud, insurrectionist, and amoral narcissist is a religious man? What sort of people enjoy listening for hours to a rambling, intellectual pygmy who alternates between bragging about himself and telling lies about pretty much everyone not named Trump? Trump’s popularity among Latter-day Saints is thankfully lower than it is among Evangelicals, but it is still way too high, especially among LDS legislators, who had the gall to censure Mitt Romney for voting his conscience, a concept they are apparently unacquainted with.

I agree with President Biden that there are a good many Republicans who do not agree with Trump and his MAGA fanatics. But among those who have any government power, who beyond Mitt Romney has the courage to speak up and oppose him? Where is that sort of courage? I just don’t see it. And sadly, I don’t see it among the other four members of Utah’s congressional delegation. All three remaining House members (Chris Stewart’s seat is empty until the special election next month) voted for Jim Jordan to be Speaker, for heaven’s sake. And Mike Lee is lost in space.

So, what will become of the GOP? I can only hope that Trump leads the party off the cliff in 2024, losing not only the presidency but both houses of Congress. If so, this may be the only way for the GOP to break free from Trumpism. But the Republican Party’s problems were not started by Trump. They have been off track for 40 years. Trump just took them where they were already heading but got them there faster. So, will a massive loss in 2024 cause introspection and a change of course? I’m sorry, but I really can’t imagine this happening. I’m afraid the only redemption for conservatives is to start a new party and leave the rotting carcass of the GOP to the MAGAts.

Dealing with the Debt

 

Because Kevin McCarthy finally ignored the extremists in his party, we narrowly (and temporarily) averted another government shutdown, which Trump was pushing and the far-right wingnuts in the GOP were hoping for—Trump for purely selfish reasons, the arsonists in the House for poorly reasoned ideological reasons. But the deal McCarthy struck with the Democrats bought us only 45 days. Sometime in mid-November we will undoubtedly be subjected to the threat of a shutdown once more. McCarthy knew that most Americans would blame the Republicans for a shutdown, rightly so, and so he did what he had to, and it cost him his job, but the budget mess is really a bipartisan act of irresponsibility. Even though the GOP is more at fault for our budgetary troubles, both parties are responsible for the massive debt we are accumulating.

Before I make some sensible (but not painless) suggestions on how to get the debt under control, let me first make a point about the national debt that most Americans don’t understand. Yes, $33 trillion is a lot of money, but it must be viewed in context. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. debt stands at an estimated 127 percent. This debt ratio is high by historical standards. Before the Bush tax cuts of 2001, for instance, the debt ratio was 33.27 percent of GDP and dropping. In 2001, the ratio jumped to 52.44 percent and has been steadily increasing ever since. The Trump tax cuts only accelerated the trend. And the pandemic caused a massive jump in the debt ratio, from 99.06 percent in 2019 to 126.23 percent in 2020. It dropped to 120.37 percent in 2021 but has been climbing the past two years.

By contrast, let’s look at some other countries. In 2021, Japan’s debt ratio was 217.61 percent, and the U.K.’s was 186.48. France’s ratio was just behind ours at 116.55 percent. Germany’s was only 68.62 percent, Canada’s was 64.04 percent, and Switzerland’s was a paltry 20.3 percent. So, a large debt ratio doesn’t necessarily mean the country is going to go bankrupt. We don’t hear about much handwringing in Japan. Maybe they understand something we don’t.  Also, the interest payments on U.S. debt are still a lot smaller as a percentage of GDP than my family’s mortgage payments were as a percentage of our family income (before we paid the loan off). And the difference between national debt and a family’s mortgage is that the mortgage has to be paid off, but national debt doesn’t. It just gets rolled over.

Economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman points out that U.S. debt was about 100 percent of GDP after World War II. So, how did we pay it off? “We didn’t,” writes Krugman. “John F. Kennedy entered the White House with federal debt roughly the same as it was on V-J Day. Why, then, wasn’t the 1960 election dominated by questions of how to pay off the national debt? Because while the dollar value of debt hadn’t gone down, economic growth and modest inflation meant that the ratio of debt to G.D.P. had fallen by half.” He makes the same point about England’s debt after the Napoleonic Wars. The British debt was about 184 percent of GDP. How did Britain pay off this debt? Well, it didn’t. The debt shrank relative to GDP as the British economy grew. So those who are up in arms about the debt right now (but didn’t seem to care about it at all when Trump was president) are being disingenuous, to put it kindly.

Still, the course we are on now is not one we ought to continue. We need to reduce the annual deficit for our long-term economic welfare. Notice I didn’t say anything about balancing the budget. That isn’t going to happen, nor is it necessary. Uninformed people, like my Representative, John Curtis, who compare the national budget to a family budget are comparing apples and kumquats. These are two entirely different sorts of budgets. And those same people usually argue for slashing spending without raising taxes, which would create all sorts of problems.

The Republicans have basically painted themselves into a corner on cutting Medicare and Social Security, which would hurt some of their most loyal supporters, and they are unwilling to cut military spending, which leaves them trying to squeeze blood out of a rock, threatening to make massive cuts to nondefense discretionary spending. But the nondefense discretionary portion of the budget amounts to only 14.5 percent of the total budget. Even if you cut this amount in half, in 2022 it would decrease spending by only $455 billion. And the effects would be devastating.

Slashing discretionary government spending, even if you include defense spending, would produce ruinous ripple effects across the economy. Many government workers would be laid off, and businesses that depend on those workers’ purchases or on direct government purchases would suffer. This could throw the economy into recession, which would create a downward spiral, affecting all corners of the economy, including a reduction in tax revenue. Aid to the most vulnerable would have to increase, unless you just want to see innocent people suffer.

So, you can’t really put a dent in the deficit without cutting Medicare and Social Security. The problem with this is that the Baby Boom generation—my generation—is reaching age 65 at the rate of 10,000 individuals per day. Yes, per day. So cutting mandatory spending—which includes not only Medicare and Social Security, but also Medicaid, income security programs, student loans, and $520 billion of things like veterans benefits and federal civilian and military retirement benefits—is going to be very difficult, if not impossible in the next decade or more.

In short, getting the budget under control cannot involve only spending cuts. This Republican fantasy doesn’t pass the simple arithmetic test. But the Republicans are still stuck in the swamp of Reagan supply-side lunacy. For 40-odd years, they have been determined to shrink government and cut taxes. All that this has accomplished is to balloon the debt and create obscene inequality, where the wealthy make off like bandits while the middle class shrinks and the poor suffer. In other words, we need to seriously increase revenues. One small way to do this is to fund the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats (like Donald Trump). But, of course, the GOP is trying to defund the IRS and protect wealthy criminals.

But let’s look at a little history. Currently, our top marginal tax rate—meaning the rate high earners pay on any income that falls in the top tax bracket—is 37 percent. By historical standards, this is very low. At the end of World War II, for instance, the top rate was 94 percent. This rate was in effect for 1944 and 1945. In 1946, the top rate dropped to 86.45 percent. It dropped again slightly for the next three years, then jumped to 91 percent for one year. In 1952, the rate increased to 92 percent; then in 1954 it dropped back to 91 percent, where it stayed for ten years. In 1964, it dropped to 77 percent. For 13 of the next 16 years, it was 70 percent. Then Ronald Reagan was elected. In 1982, because of the GOP’s misplaced belief in supply-side economics, Congress dropped the top rate to 50 percent, where it stayed until 1987, when it dropped again to 38.5 percent. In 1988, the rate dropped to a modern low, 28 percent. Three years later, it increased to 31 percent, and two years after that it increased to 39.6 percent. The Bush tax cuts dropped the top rate to 35 percent. These cuts expired in 2014, so the rate went back up to 39.6 percent. The Trump tax cuts dropped the top rate to 37 percent, where it has stayed. As mentioned above, this rate, along with cuts in the capital gains tax rate, allowed the wealthy to accumulate obscene amounts of money.

To put this in some sort of international context, let’s compare U.S. taxes to those of other developed countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a group of 38 member nations that describes itself as a forum committed to democracy and market economy. These countries are considered “developed” nations. The OECD publishes statistics about each member country, including total tax revenue (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP. The numbers are instructive.

The United States, for example, is very low on this list, with only Chile, Costa Rica, Ireland, Mexico, and Turkey collecting a lower percentage of GDP in taxes. The U.S. rate is 26.58 percent (2021 being the most recent year for which statistics are available). The average rate for all 38 OECD countries is 34.11 percent, 7.53 percent higher than the U.S. If you look at just those countries that are considered America’s peer nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K), their tax receipts weigh in at an average of 37.63 percent of GDP, 11.05 percent higher than the U.S.

In other words, by any international standard, the U.S. is severely undertaxed, despite what you will hear from right-wing politicians, who are still living Reagan’s supply-side fantasy. If we were to tax at the OECD average rate, our federal, state, and local governments would have had an additional $1.76 trillion to spend in 2021. If we were to tax at the rate of our peer nations, we would have had an additional $2.58 trillion in 2021. Either figure would be enough to create a budget surplus and have plenty left over to invest in infrastructure, pay public school teachers decent wages, do more to combat global warming, and much, much more. Perhaps it would also encourage us to adopt universal health care, which would actually save us money in the long run, since we pay double for health care what most other developed countries pay—and they provide health care for all their citizens, something the GOP will not allow America to do because it’s “too expensive” and it’s “socialism.”

Increasing taxes, mainly on the wealthy, would need to be implemented gradually, and it would perhaps cause a decrease in the demand for certain products and services, primarily those purchased by the wealthy, but this economic impact would certainly be offset by investments in the lower and middle classes, where the multiplier effect would stretch the economic impact of those extra tax revenues.

Another source of revenue is corporate taxes, and again the U.S. lags the field here. On average, OECD countries collect corporate taxes to the tune of 9.8 percent of GDP. The United States collects only 6 percent. Again, this includes federal, state, and local taxes. In 2022, the federal government collected only $425 billion in corporate income taxes. When divided into total corporate profits for the year of $3.523 trillion, that gives us an effective tax rate of 12 percent. When divided into GDP, it amounts to only 1.8 percent. Corporations used to be chartered by government to serve public purposes. Over the years, they have turned into instruments for funneling wealth into the hands of the already wealthy. When you consider that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned 89 percent of all U.S. stocks in 2021 and the bottom 90 percent held about 11 percent, you can see how corporate profits primarily benefit the already wealthy, which increases the concentration of wealth year by year. Increasing corporate taxation would help level the playing field as well as help pay down our national debt.

But, as I indicated above, getting the budget under control has to be a two-pronged effort. We do need to rein in some government spending, and we do need to reform both Medicare and Social Security. The first thing we should do is means text both programs. By this I mean making sure that the benefits go only to those who really need them. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, for instance, should not be on Medicare or be receiving monthly Social Security checks. Where the cutoff would be is a matter for politicians to haggle over, but there are many in this country who simply don’t need a social safety net. The second thing we should do is remove the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security and Medicare. Currently, that amount is $160,200. Any income earned above that figure is not taxed. If we would tax all income, our Social Security and Medicare funds would not be in trouble. And since most income earned by the wealthy does not come in the form of a paycheck, we should also levy a tax on capital gains that would help support these two programs for our senior citizens, too many of whom have not been paid well enough to have saved sufficient funds for retirement.

For too long, Republicans have been dishonest about the effects of tax cuts and the insistence that we can slash government spending without causing severe economic turmoil. On the other hand, Democrats have also been unrealistic in their insistence on refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and too dogmatic about not trimming discretionary spending. And both parties need to face the music on defense spending. We have the best military in the world, but it is also bloated and inefficient in many ways. We spend more on defense than the next ten countries combined (or 13, depending on which statistics you use). To automatically increase military spending every year, even in times of peace, is unwise and unnecessary.

In short, the debt is not a problem we can’t fix. Some of my solutions are not painless, but they are also not unreasonable. We just have to demand more of our elected leaders and stop listening to disinformation.