Posted on 08/15/2011 7:50:41 AM PDT by jfd1776
Reflections on a debate question
Most reporters ask the same questions again and again, variations on a theme… “what did you do,” “what do you want to do,” and maybe even “what do you think of what somebody else did?”
But, once in a while, an election cycle produces a defining theme, so one single average-sounding question can teach us a fundamental truth, or two, or three.
Such a moment occurred when Bret Baier of Fox News asked the Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination whether they found tax hikes so distasteful that they would walk away from a ten to one deal – ten dollars in spending cuts in exchange for one measly dollar in tax hikes. Every candidate on the stage, unanimously, confirmed that they would indeed walk away from such a deal.
There are a host of lessons in this story.
The Quality of Debate
For years, Republicans have watched Republican candidates stand humbly upon a stage, to be asked questions that may matter to Democrats, may matter to independents, and certainly matter to the reporters… but don’t matter in the least to the Republicans who will turn out at the primaries and caucuses to declare their selections.
All over the country, year after year, Republicans yell at their televisions: “Why CNN?” “Why the League of Women Voters?” “Why ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS?” “Why do we let THEM grill our guys???”
The Academy Awards have people in the film industry select the best films. The CMA Awards enable people in the country music industry to select the best songs. In all normal contests, the judges and voters are people who like the contestants, and who like what those contestants do… people who would most likely appreciate the best that the genre has to offer.
Imagine having the rap and hip hop industries select the best country western singer… having flat-earthers determine the winner of the Nobel Prize for physics… having the editorial staff of The American Atheist appoint the next Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, or the American Nazis elect the Lubavicher Rabbi. Ridiculous, right? Outrageous.
But that’s what we do, election cycle after election cycle, when we allow liberals and leftists to moderate the forums, and to ask the debate questions – people whom we know will never vote for the GOP candidate, no matter who wins the nomination. They ask the wrong questions; they cover the wrong issues. The viewers scream questions at their televisions that never get asked; they wait anxiously for follow-ups that don’t even enter the questioners’ minds.
The liberal press has every right to moderate the debates and forums of the Democratic Party. They themselves have a dog in that fight; they are picking who their party will run against the GOP in the fall. It makes sense.
But they have no business moderating the debates and forums of the GOP. These candidates, their supporters and donors, their campaign volunteers, and the GOP voters themselves will all be making a choice in the voting booth, based at least partially on the results of these events. It is insane, foolish, self-destructive, for this critical and complex job to be given to people who wouldn’t vote for the GOP if it was the only party on earth!
The Fox News debate on the eve of the Iowa Straw Poll wasn’t perfect – technically, these things are jumbled Q&A sessions anyway, not debates at all, since hardly ever is a single identical question asked of every candidate. Still, it was far better for Republicans than the norm. The moderator and panel were from Fox News, National Review, and the Washington Examiner, three of the few news sources that regularly treat Republicans fairly.
And this question was indeed a proper debate question: asked equally of all participants, giving each a chance to satisfy or upset the audience with their response, even if that response was limited to a simple hand signal. To a straightforward question, they could give a straightforward answer. Offered a ten to one deal, would you walk away? You betcha, unanimously.
Good for Bret Baier, good for Fox, and good for these nominees.
What did it mean?
To the liberals, this appeared to be a gotcha question – an opportunity to produce an extreme reaction that would enable the left to attack the GOP, to say “See? See???!!! These Republicans are extreme!” They could not conceive of a politician who wouldn’t happily compromise away his deepest-held beliefs if he could look like a hero in so doing.
But to be a gotcha question, the person asked must cringe from it. The Republicans were happy to be asked it, happy to be given the chance to show that they agree with the primary electorate on this matter.
With this question, the Republican nominees were given an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the incumbent, and from the incumbent’s kleptocratic party, and perhaps from his kleptocratic fifth column in the media as well.
The Republicans on that stage, even the most liberal among them, understand some basic truths about this country, the economy, and the voters too, that the left simply doesn’t understand or accept. Given a chance to show this understanding with a simple raise of a hand, these candidates jumped at it.
The National Mood
The left believes that the mantra of the American electorate today is “cut spending.” They see opinion polls that they think they understand, and they weigh them against a century of reality, concluding that all they need to do is promise spending cuts – never deliver, just promise them – and they’ll be viewed as effective negotiators.
What they refuse to accept is that the national mood is bigger than that, and savvier. The national mood is that we need a return to Constitutional principles, not just on one issue – government spending – but on all issues, from the size of government to what it does with – and to – the amount of our money it steals.
The Tea Party movement, after all, has embraced an acronym: “TEA: Taxed Enough Already.” They aren’t single-issue automatons; they are a movement committed to a rollback of the errors of the 20th century. They know that we cannot just cut one thing, we must be balanced. Spending, taxes, regulatory overreach – all must be cut, not just one of them. And those cuts must be real.
So the left’s shock was misplaced. The GOP’s base, along with the independents we know will be needed in the general election, knows that a tax hike would be fatal, so the wise presidential candidate is not afraid to make such a commitment; in fact, he jumps at the chance to get on the right side of this issue.
Taxed Too Much Already
These candidates understand that the American tax burden is too great. No, not on everyone, but certainly on the people we need.
We need businesses to employ people, to create jobs, to spend and invest. And we need employed people, people with jobs and houses and kids and pets, to spend their money, as well as to invest it. All this is good – whether an individual takes his family out to dinner or a company buys some office supplies, it all invigorates the economy by injecting it with capital through a voluntary private purchase. The more voluntary private purchases there are, the stronger the economy becomes; the more people are hired and promoted.
Our tax burden on businesses is crippling them. Every penny of taxes hurts. Our tax burden on individuals often drives them out of business, or out of home states like Illinois and Wisconsin, to move to Florida or Texas. Not every day, not publicly, so you’d notice… but quietly, barely noticeably, companies find they must close or draw down their Illinois operation in favor of their Alabama operation, or close their New York plant in favor of their Shanghai facility.
And how many new businesses simply are not started at all, because of the tax burden? Or are started, but not here… in China, Malaysia, India, Japan instead… because their own home country has made them unwelcome through a confiscatory tax structure that punishes investment, manufacturing, commerce, and risk, the crucial building blocks for prosperity.
Our tax burden is so high that any increase, however slight, can only contribute to the continued erosion of our economy and the continued increase in our long-term unemployment statistics. The Democrats may be biologically unable to process this fact, but the Republicans get it, so their candidates are happy to have the chance to show the world the truth.
Spending isn’t taxation.
The left has presented these two general issue buckets – taxation and spending – as if they are equal, and it’s true that it seems, at first blush, like they must be.
To spend a hundred dollars, you must tax or borrow a hundred dollars. So either cutting the spending or agreeing to tax as much as you spend appears to be a balanced approach. Either way gets you to a balanced budget, doesn’t it? It makes sense.
It makes sense, but it’s wrong. In fact, both spending and taxation have almost unlimited attributes that make them incomparable. We simply cannot gauge the one the same way as we gauge the other.
Spending is either justifiable or not. Once spending is unjustifiable, it must be stopped, regardless of whether the funds are there to fund it or not. The left has spent a century finding ways for money to be there, so they could do whatever they want, spend as much as they like. But the right knows, rightly, that unjustifiable spending (that is, spending on unconstitutional projects or government activity), is simply unjustifiable, regardless of whether the funds are there or not. If the funds are there, then spend them on Constitutional functions. And if the funds are not there, then don’t borrow them. There is never a justification for spending money on an unconstitutional project.
Taxation, on the other hand, is justifiable as long as it is collected fairly for Constitutional projects, and becomes unjustifiable at one of two points certain: when it is collected unfairly for unconstitutional projects, and when it exceeds the magical point of no return on the Laffer Curve, that level beyond which the economic suppression caused by that taxation level begins to produce negative returns. And oh yes, we’ve passed that point long since.
The GOP base, and everyone else whom the Democrats desperately need but see themselves losing right now, are all painfully aware that both spending and taxation are too high. They know that we need to cut both, that the proportion isn’t even the issue. Cut taxes on the employers, the job creators, the investors… and cut wasteful spending. Do both, as much as you can.
But in the first place, do nothing wrong; make nothing worse. In the first place, as Hippocrates insisted, do no harm.
So these candidates know what their voters want: an acknowledgment that both spending and taxes must be cut, and no increase in either is acceptable.
A matter of trust.
It has been said that elephants never forget. Whether that’s true in the zoological world or not is no subject for a political website, but we can say this much with conviction: The Party of the Elephant has learned the lessons of the Reagan and Bush I administrations.
In the Reagan years, the president was talked into a three-for-one deal – three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases. It sounded, at the time, like a reasonable deal. But the taxes took effect right away, and the spending cuts were budgetary fictions; they never actually occurred. So the GOP won its first lesson: don’t trust the Democrats for a balanced plan; they will break it. And the GOP also won its second lesson: do the spending cuts first; only agree to tax hikes, if you must, after the spending cuts have already begun to bear fruit. For the rest of his life, Ronald Reagan regretted being hornswaggled like this.
In the Bush I years, the president was talked into a different tax increase; during the moderately difficult times of a serious recession (though nothing in comparison to the Obama recession), George H. W. Bush was talked into raising taxes, despite having made a solid vow of “no new taxes” in his 1988 campaign. He signed onto a tax hike, and immediately, the press ran with “Read My Lips: I Lied” on the front page of newspapers. And the GOP learned another lesson. Some campaign promises can perhaps be broken, though of course none should… but certainly not promises concerning taxes. Once you promise “no new taxes”, you must honor that pledge, or accept the consequences.
But the bigger issue here is not a matter of promises kept and promises broken; it is a question of whether the voters can trust a candidate to understand the public will on economics. And by unanimously agreeing that ANY tax hike is too high a price to pay for spending cuts, the GOP has demonstrated unity, commitment, and an understanding of the public mind on this issue. A country that has suffered this much economic destruction should suffer no more; we must hold firm.
When the Democrats agree to a spending cut, they plan it for years in the future, so it may never come about. When they get the GOP to agree on a tax increase, however, they make sure it takes place immediately; they write it into the tax code before the ink is dry on the lunch receipt. We must therefore ensure that we never get talked into these deals; the tax hikes happen, and the spending cuts do not. Ever.
And we simply MUST be smart enough to know that fact.
The Nature of Compromise
There’s been a lot of loose talk lately about what compromise is. Most of the definitions making the rounds exist in some amoral reality in which the art of the deal is the only issue. Can we come to an agreement? Some agreement? Any agreement at all?
Vice President Biden has indicated that a good compromise is one in which both sides go away frustrated. People say that compromise means that both sides get something and give up something, so neither can say they won.
And outside of politics, that might be an acceptable definition.
The problem in this context is that we have certain things we must accomplish, and certain things we must forbid. If we accept the prevailing definition, then we must agree to allow the left to do some of the destructive plans they want, in exchange for getting some of the improvements that we want. Does this make sense? Are such negotiations helpful if they violate the rules above, by authorizing tax hikes, for example, in exchange for spending cuts?
A proper definition of compromise is that both sides make proposals, but you only agree to moderation along your own side of the issue. If we want a 20% tax cut, and the Dems want a 20% tax hike, then the liberals would consider a measly 10% tax hike to be a compromise. They consider it a favor when they only accept a measly portion of what they started out demanding.
In fact, however, the proper definition of compromise requires setting our demands, and staying true to them. The demands, for example, may be No New Taxes, so that instead of the Democrats raising them by 20%, we can insist that they are cut by at least 5%, or even 3%. Some progress is necessary along our side of the argument, or we have already lost.
The GOP must demand huge reductions in the tax burden on the employment class, and never settle for an increase. A proper compromise is to allow a smaller tax cut than we called for. We must never allow a tax increase, in this economy. That would not be a compromise, it would be capitulation.
A moment of pride.
When the GOP candidates agreed that any tax increase was worse than the good that any spending cuts could do, it showed America that they understood at last.
They understood that taxes are too high, that taxes today are simply destructive.
They understood that the GOP primary and caucus voters have communicated a message that must not be dismissed, and they now respect these grassroots more than they defer to the establishment. At last.
And they understood, finally, the true difference between compromise and capitulation. Worthy compromise is when the GOP gets a deal that moves us, not as far as we’d like, but at least some level of improvement. And an unworthy capitulation is one in which the left rolls us, perhaps not as much as they hoped, but enough to do damage indeed.
Baby steps in the right direction are good. Let’s learn to be satisfied with these baby steps, as long as there are no steps backward… and then one day, when we have majorities in the House and Senate, and a real American in the White House, then we can leave both capitulation and compromise behind, and confidently move forward along the path of uncompromising liberty.
Copyright 2011 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance lecturer. His columns appear regularly in the Illinois Review.
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So why, oh why..did Nancy Reagan and the Reagan Library trustees initiall agree to have the FIRST GOP debate (which happily was cancelled) sponsored by MSNBC?
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