How Grover Norquist makes the case for tax increases

In our interview yesterday, Grover Norquist argued that Republicans shouldn?t strike deficit deals with Democrats because the spending cuts never stick but the tax increases always do. I don?t really buy it, but looking at Naftali Bendavid?s description of the deal being developed in the Senate makes me a bit more sympathetic: ?The package under consideration would essentially force Congress, within a short period of time, to come up with changes to spending and tax rules to achieve that goal over the next decade.?

Most of the savings envisioned by the Fiscal Commission were of the ?government must figure out how to save some money? variety. They named a spending target and told Congress to reach it. That?s a popular strategy for spending cuts: Both House Republicans and the administration are talking about long-term freezes on non-defense discretionary spending without giving specifics for where those cuts will be made in years two, three, four and five. If you look at Paul Ryan?s Roadmap ? a model Norquist said he supports ? the idea is to cap how much money Medicare beneficiaries get and hope the system will somehow make do with radically less. The Affordable Care Act also has some spending caps, notably in Medicare?s productivity payments. The deficit-reduction plan released by Norquist?s Americans for Tax Reform took the same approach: A 10-year spending freeze across various sectors of government with few specifics on how to implement it. If any or all of these policies passed next year, it?s still pretty easy to imagine future congresses exceeding the limits set in 2012.

Of course, I?d take a different conclusion from that then the one Norquist does: Radically reducing spending is hard. The stuff that?s easy to cut, like earmarks, doesn?t amount to much. There?s just not that much obviously wasteful or unnecessary spending ? particularly when you realize that the word ?spending? really means ?medical procedures, Social Security checks and military costs.? But if you don?t believe that having Congress promise that future congresses will figure out how to cut spending will work ? and it?s clear that Norquist, for one, doesn?t trust that strategy ? then that makes tax increases more necessary for balancing the budget, not less. Norquist gets around that because his stated goal isn?t to balance the budget, but since fairly few politicians or policy wonks are willing to admit they don?t care about deficits, that excuse doesn?t work for very many participants in this debate.

Source: http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=22001f95c87a9868c3253e6fb5cc348f

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