The Futility of Grand Budget Bargains
By I endorse this, with one caveat:
1) There is no such a thing as a grand bargain. You cannot tie the hands of future Congresses. That a deal has been struck does not mean that other lawmakers will not continue to fight for their priorities.
2) Republicans care only about tax cuts for rich people. They will not agree to anything which increases taxes on rich people. At “best” they’ll agree to things like getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction, something which in dollar terms benefits rich people a lot, but in “this matters to me” terms benefits middle and upper middle class people a lot.
3) Putting Social Security into some CBO or Trustee scored actuarial balance will not stop Republicans and the Washington Post from trying to gut it even more. They gave away the game when they asserted that the Trust Fund is a fantasy. In other words, prefunding future benefits is just a way to tax poor people instead of rich people, and they have no intention of honoring that deal if they can manage to not do it.
The caveat is that while a few individual Republicans might advocate getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction, the Republican conference as a whole will never do so. The EITC, they’ll agree to get rid of.
The third point here is especially important. The last “grand bargain” on Social Security involved substantial regressive tax increases, and was followed by conservatives asserting that the trust fund the regressive tax increases created was a fraud. You’d have to be crazy or mendacious to fall for that bait-and-switch again.
…excellent point from Holden: “It’s worse than that. Conservatives asserted that the trust fund created by the regressive tax increases was a fraud while simultaneously lowering taxes on the rich because the money they borrowed from the trust fund (in the form of the bonds issued to the fund) created a budget “surplus”. One must note that Alan Greenspan ran both ends of this particular con game.” In fairness, Greenspan had a point in 2001 about how we didn’t want to wait until surpluses turned into the mushroom cloud of paying off the national debt…