Let's Not Make a Deal
by Robert Roy Pool
Why Congress Cannot Solve the Debt Ceiling Impasse
And How it Will – Eventually
For the last few months most Americans have assumed that Congress will eventually reach a compromise on taxes and spending, as it always has in the past, and raise the debt ceiling. Events of the last week, however, have confirmed that this is not likely soon. Underlying political, economic and philosophical factors combine to make this particular negotiation more difficult than any previous fiscal impasse in our nation's history. These factors will not disappear or abate any time soon. The result is likely to be protracted stalemate. Almost all Americans will suffer.
The New Bolsheviks
The most important single obstacle to the usual bipartisan centrist agreement are the rabid Tea Party conservatives elected last fall as Republicans. They are acting like Republicans In Name Only, but rather than behaving as moderates, like the RINOs of the past, they are behaving like zealots, bent on having their way regardless of the resistance they encounter, the pain they inflict, or the chaos they cause. The fact that the Tea Party Republicans represent only a small minority of the country is not important to their belief in their mission. They believe they have seen The Truth, as though from a divine revelation, and they are bent on imposing their divine truth on the American majority who do not share their beliefs.
In some key respects The Tea Party Republicans are similar to the fanatical Bolsheviks who seized control of Russia in 1917. Like the Tea Party, the Bolsheviks represented only a small fraction of the spectrum of Russian political opinion at the time. They succeeded in seizing all power for themselves because Russia had very weak democratic institutions, and because the Bolsheviks were more zealous and more ruthless than any of their competitors. The “belief intensity” of the Bolsheviks was deeper and stronger than the “belief intensity” of their primary rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, who in spite of their name were a much more moderate party.
The SRs wanted land reform – take away the estates of the wealthy and redistribute the land to the peasants – but they did not support the collectivization of farms or the systematic killing of their enemies. Although the SRs had much greater support than the Bolsheviks in the Russian countryside, the Bolsheviks – who came to be known in history as the Communists – had seen The Truth and felt obligated to impose The Truth on their countrymen. Under the ruthless leadership of Vladimir Lenin, the Communists hijacked the Russian state for 74 years.
Of course, the Tea Party Republicans don’t believe the same twisted economic dogma as the Bolsheviks. The Tea Partiers have invented their own twisted economic dogma, which they espouse as passionately as Lenin espoused communism. Both economic belief systems are based on germs on truth, but both are extremely simplistic, rooted in a set of assumptions about how the world works that are neither proved nor provable. Both belief systems are an attempt to simplify a complex world so that it can be understood by millions of people not inclined to think deeply or ask troublesome questions about how zealots claim to know what they think they know.
Normally, the only way such simplistic ideologies can be imposed on a skeptical world is through violence. That is how the Bolsheviks succeeded. The Tea Partiers have succeeded so far by hostage-taking. They have taken hostage the largest economy in the world, and they have demanded that a radical experiment be conducted on it with no preparation, no controls, and no consensus. To their skeptical countrymen, their plan seems insane.
In contrast to the Communists, who saw class struggle as the basis of all conflict in history – a simple idea based on a smidgen of truth – the Tea Partiers turn a blind eye to the crushing class warfare that has been going on in the United States since the last decade of the 20th Century – class warfare in which only one class has yet been engaged, the super-rich. The Tea Partiers are carrying the water for these wealthiest Americans without necessarily understanding the consequences of their actions, or the counter-reactions they will provoke.
Rather than “class struggle” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by its vanguard, the Communist Party,” the Tea Party mantra involves “tax cuts, smaller government, and a balanced budget.” But it is not the content of their beliefs that matters. It is the structure of their thinking, and the relationship between their beliefs and the evidence – or lack of evidence – that supports them.
The Tea Partiers’ attention is maniacally fixated on taxation policy. They do not understand the complexity of our vast global economy – let’s be honest, no one really does – but they passionately believe taxes, more than any other single factor, drive business decisions. In an economy with many hundreds of variables, they focus on one variable above all others, and they believe fervently that by adjusting this one variable – tax cuts! – all sorts of good things can be made to happen.
They also believe passionately in a balanced budget for the Federal Government, primarily because they believe this will allow for lower taxes. A balanced budget amendment would actually cause taxes to rise sharply, especially on the rich, but the Tea Partiers haven’t thought this through yet. They mistakenly believe that most Americans would prefer to let seniors die in poverty or go without medical attention so that “job creators” can retain a few extra millions in their paychecks. They choose not to notice that polls show the exact opposite: most Americans, by overwhelming margins, support social security and Medicare. Most Americans support increased taxes on the rich.
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