Same as the Old Boss: Why the Republicans Are a Spent Force

Posted by: Peter Jackson on May 11, 2006 02:33:09 PM -05:00    

And this time you don't have to take my word for it, just check out this month's discussion at Cato Unbound. In the lead essay, no less a conservative light than David Frum offers a startling, full confession of the Republicans' squandering of not only the political opportunity which sprang forth from their 1994 Congressional takeover, but also of the Reagan Revolution itself. Frum is joined in the discussion by the similarly serious Bruce Bartlett, David Boaz, and Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.

Where Frum is glum, Bartlett is positively distraught. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the conversation comes from Bartlett when he reluctantly calls for a VAT tax to pay for all the entitlement spending which he seems convinced is wanted by the majority of Americans. That's right, a Value Added Tax, the scourge of Europe. Although Bartlett argues for the VAT's low level of economic disruption, he doesn't neglect to mention, to his credit, some of VAT's more corrosive effects, such as how the invisibility of value-added taxes, being embedded in the prices of consumer goods and services, entices politicians to increase them until that morning in the near future when we wake to find ourselves all paying two thirds of our income to the government— even the poorest amongst us. This is precisely the fate VAT taxes have wrought throughout Europe. Bartlett doesn't mention, however, that VAT taxes are entirely unmitigable for the poor. The most destitute ghetto mother pays the same amount of taxes embedded in a box of Pampers as Melinda Gates does.

But Bartlett quickly admits the desperation that drives his unenthusiastic support for VAT and makes a good faith (if not plaintive) call for new ideas in the forum. Well how about this:  

Fundementally reform the tax system and the entitlement system simultaneously. Charles Murray has recently added his ideas of just such a reform in his new book In Our Hands to those of Neal Boortz and John Linder's Fair Tax. In addition to this, the Liberal Capitalist Party would add the concept of the Zero-Tax Society, whereby the government's gross receipts are distributed according to a predetermined formula, with a portion being allocated to the government's expenditures, a portion paid against the Federal debt and a final portion to be paid into a National Trust, which we will grow from continuous earnings and contributions until proceeds from the Trust are sufficient to pay the government's operating expenses. This same formula can be implemented at every level of government, promising future generations a life where ALL of the fruits of their labor will remain theirs: the dawn of the Zero-Tax Society.

Now to me, the question is: are the Republicans capable of backing such a reform? I believe the answer is no. It's suggested in the Cato discussion more than once that the government shutdown/showdown of the nineties was the beginning of the end for the Republicans; they found themselves incapable of articulating a reason— even to themselves— for what they were doing. And as Boaz points out in his essay, there simply isn't any evidence of leadership within the GOP capable of getting us past the status quo.

In short, fellow citizens, the Republican Party literally has no idea what it's doing anymore,  and there's no reason to believe they're going to figure it out any time soon. So on that note, I'd like to take the opportunity to personally invite Frum, Bartlett, Boaz, and the others, as well as Jon Henke and the other bloggers, to support a new major party like Kadima in Israel, a centrist party, a classically liberal party, a Jacksonian party— the Liberal Capitalist Party.