To judge by the photographic evidence, the Republicans have become the political wing of the AARP — so it does not surprise me to find that their policy prescriptions amount to repealing President Barack Obama’s signature health law (who needs it when you’ve got Medicare?), extending the Bush tax cuts, freezing discretionary spending and canceling the Troubled Asset Relief Program (which they seem to suggest was not, in fact, one of the last gasps of the Bush administration).
I am used to the idea that political parties will misrepresent statistics in the service of partisan interest, and I am accustomed to the increasingly dreadful prose emanating from the pens and mouths of America’s political classes. What I find strongly objectionable in the Republicans’ proposals is the inescapable conclusion that they intend to begin their control of Congress in 2011 exactly where they left off in 2007: Rather than the tax-and-spend Democrats, we shall have the spend-but-don’t-tax Republicans.
I do not mean to suggest that Democrats have been successful in controlling the federal deficit or that they have a serious plan to reign in government spending — but at least they have not proposed a plan which will, so far as I can tell, drive our deficit even higher. The Republicans didn’t include anybody under 40 in their album of America for a very good reason: We’re the people who will be footing the bill for their largesse.
The political issue du jour is economics: Culture wars are popular only insofar as they allow Republicans to denounce the liberal elites. The fiscal flashpoint of the moment is the Bush tax cuts, which are shortly set to expire. Because this is a recession, there are good reasons to think they should be allowed to run at least a little longer. The Democrats (mostly) want to maintain them for households earning less than $250,000 a year. Republicans have demanded that the cuts be made permanent for everyone — which would, according to Princeton’s own Paul Krugman, add about $3.7 trillion to our national debt over the next 10 years.
One might think that the Republicans — having somehow garnered a reputation for fiscal sanity — would therefore propose savings on the same order, somewhere down the line, to balance our national checkbook, which is already badly out of order. They don’t. They suggest eliminating the much-maligned TARP and capping discretionary spending, but these savings are like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.
Krugman thinks the Republicans plan to square this circle by dismantling Medicare and privatizing Social Security — but at least that would actually generate the savings necessary to pay for the decrease in tax revenue. I see no reason for so optimistic a scenario. I assume the Republicans plan to pick up exactly where they left off in 2007 and put it all on plastic — after all, about half the people in those photographs won’t be around in 30 years when the Treasury bills come due.
But students at Princeton will be at roughly the peak of our earning power just about when the gerontocrats’ liberality will need servicing. Debts carry interest, and money spent on credit today is money taken from tomorrow. The Republicans are not even making the tired, old Reagan-era argument that lowering taxes raises revenue: Trained like Pavlovian dogs, they just want to cut taxes, regardless of the effect on the deficit.
The basic Republican philosophy that it is better for individuals to spend their own money than for government to spend it as taxes remains an attractive and intelligent argument. The problem is that this new crop of Republicans — led by a gaggle of talk-show hosts and celebrities, in ironic reversal of their old insult against the man who still has more autobiographies than years in the White House — seem to have given up on half the equation. The people should be given a choice between high taxes and generous benefits or low taxes and few benefits. The only choice we get now is between plastic and paralysis.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the 18–24 set are more likely to vote for “American Idol” than the American president — and college students at a polling station during a midterm election are about as common as Republicans in Chelsea. (Ken Mehlman and counting.) There is little incentive to cater to a constituency famously lacking in electoral enthusiasm. But I see no reason why the fiscally responsible sort of Republicans (like New Jersey’s own governor, Chris Christie) shouldn’t be rewarded by the votes of young people with a rightward tilt — nor why Democrats in the mold of Bill Clinton, who knew how to balance a checkbook, shouldn’t receive the mandate of left-leaning collegians. Grown-ups are fond of handing over our first credit cards with a warning about the perils of debt: Perhaps it’s time we taught the lesson back.
Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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