Poor David Brooks. He so desperately wants to be the outside-the-box, creative conservative. The guy who believes in what the good ol’ Republican party used to stand for, and who feels free to chastise today’s GOP for its unfaithfulness to those vaunted ideals, while also castigating the Dems for their profligate ways.
But when it comes down to it, Brooks actually has almost nothing to say. It’s amazing, given how many column inches and TV and radio minutes the guy gets, that he seems not to have a single interesting, creative idea about how to move America forward, as the saying goes.
Consider today’s NYT op-ed column. Brooks is oh so disappointed in today’s presidential candidates. They just don’t meet his very, very high standards.
I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.
Harsh words indeed! Brooks, no doubt, has some solutions to offer.
If there were a Hamiltonian Party, it would be offering a multifaceted reinvigoration agenda. It would grab growth ideas from all spots on the political spectrum and blend them together. Its program would be based on the essential political logic: If you want to get anything passed, you have to offer an intertwined package that smashes the Big Government vs. Small Government orthodoxies and gives everybody something they want.
OK … I have no idea what that means. Got some specifics?
This reinvigoration package would have four baskets. There would be an entitlement reform package designed to redistribute money from health care and the elderly toward innovation and the young. Unless we get health care inflation under control by replacing the perverse fee-for-service incentive structure, there will be no money for anything else.
Actually a somewhat promising start, in that payment reform is a necessary step toward getting health care costs under control. Not much on specifics, but he only has so many column inches to work with.
There would be a targeted working-class basket: early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy if need be — anything that might give the working class a leg up.
Also not crazy. But notice that we are now getting into stuff that costs money. I wonder how we’ll pay for it?
There would be a political corruption basket. The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country. It’s time to drain the swamp by simplifying the tax code and streamlining the regulations businesses use to squash their smaller competitors.
And we have now gone officially off the rails. Brooks’s logic, if you can call it that, is completely incomprehensible here. We need to get rid of the “unholy alliance between business and government,” so what we should do is … give Wall Street exactly what it wants in the form of lower (he says “simplified,” but we all know what that means) taxes and less (again, “streamlined” is a popular euphemism) regulation. What’s really needed in this “basket” is campaign finance reform, in the form of dramatically increased transparency, along with full funding, implementation, and extension of Dodd-Frank, which was a decent start on a problem that needs additional fixes. That’s how you shatter the “unholy alliance” that troubles Brooks. His proposal does exactly nothing.
There would also be a pro-business basket: lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research.
As if his previous “basket” wasn’t pro-business enough, here’s another Wall Street wish list, headed by lower taxes. And more money for research? Again, sounds great, but how do we pay for it while cutting taxes for business?
Nowhere on Brooks’s list is there even a hint of the most modest measures on the revenue side, like letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. He does say that additional “gigantic tax cuts” are both unrealistic and irresponsible, but he seems entirely content to let the current status quo continue, except that business taxes should be lower. Great.
At the end of the day, Brooks’s “Hamiltonian agenda” is a joke. It does nothing to solve the short-term problem of there not being enough money to do what actually needs to be done (other than a non-specific call for moving away from fee-for-service medicine), never mind expand where we need to expand (e.g., “more money for research”), nor does it do anything to address the longer-term issues of the deficit and the debt, since apparently nothing’s on the table on the revenue side. Brooks pretends to be a different, more sensible breed of Republican who’s above the folks actually running for office. But really, he’s a classic panderer: everybody gets stuff they want, and nobody has to pay for it. How disappointing.
Charley on the MTA says
with fewer deductions and loopholes is not crazy. If GE makes billions in profits, it should pay taxes on those.
David says
I’d be interested in hearing more. I don’t have a lot of confidence that it is, but I could be wrong.
centralmassdad says
Higher taxes, all around, but particularly at higher brackets. Fewer deductions all around reduces the actual rate hike. Tax code simplification in the form of the elimination of corporate income tax (just tax it as income when it goes to the individuals) and elimination of the capital gains tax outright. Keep the estate tax, and make it bite, but with a very substantial exemption, so that only the truly, actually wealthy pay, and then keep the gift tax at high amounts to make sure it cannot be planned around. A little hike in social security and medicare, implemented slowly. A slow phase out of the home mortgage interest deduction.
Also: significant spending reductions. First, defense; no more buying the gear to repel a Soviet invasion of Western Europe with conventional forces. Another round of worldwide base closings (especially overseas Army bases). Korea? Woot, woot, we won in Iraq and Afghanistan, now get the F out of there. Hey guys, terrorism sucks and all, but the security issue is China, not Islamic terrorists. Plan for that, please.
Then, entitlements: retirement age bumped up, benefits reduced a bit, or frozen without COLAs for a few years. Medicaid (this one hurts as I have older parents nearing nursing home territory): make it a poverty program, not a gave-everything-to-the-kids-and-can’t-pay-for-nursing-home program.
Finally, the smaller potatoes: non defense, non-entitlement. There ought to be a rather significant pruning of these things, all of which are lovely and do wonderful things for children with sad eyes, but need not all be done by the government.
Taxes up, spending down=budget deficit reduced. It has happened before, in 1982 and again in 1993. You might note that the periods following these measures were not notable for prolonged recession.
Not useful solutions: Tax cuts. Increases in social security, medicare, medicaid benefits. More “stimulus” spending. Targeted tax hikes, or cuts for that matter. “Green jobs.”
Worst case scenario: tax cuts AND spending increases.
Most likely outcome?
David says
it’s a darn sight better than what Brooks is peddling.
centralmassdad says
The problem is that a workable solution would require each side to give ground on one of its taboo issues. GOP needs to allow a take HIKE, needs to allow end to useless big money defense programs. Dems need to raise taxes on everyone, not just rich, need to enact unpopular changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
In other words, each gets political cover for its concession by the other’s concession. Very hard to see that happening in the present climate. Frankly, while the Pawlenty Plan is nonsense, there really isn’t any kind of Democratic plan to speak of that is not also nonsense.
Which is why I think that we will get a you-forget-about-cutting spending, we’ll-allow-a-tax-cut deal this summer. Which is kind of like treating your emphysema by smoking more and stopping visits to the doctor.
roarkarchitect says
We need to stop paying for western Europe defense.
“June 10 (Bloomberg) — Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a parting shot to Europe before leaving office this month, said NATO risks “collective military irrelevance” unless U.S. allies contribute more to the alliance’s operations.”
I disagree about Korea – it’s a scary place and we shouldn’t withdraw there, the Hermit Kingdom will attack and destroy a democracy.
Yes some sort of universal health care, maybe vouchers, but there must be some way to bring market forces to health care.
petr says
We have market forces in health care now. What makes you think we don’t?
We have universal education in part as a result of an ennobling sense that education improves the live of everybody and in part as a result of squeamishness at market forces that had put young children to work (often crippling and/or killing them). Universal education, on the whole, has turned out pretty well…
We have universal legal representation as a result of an egalitarian frame of mind and a similar squeamishness at the thought of injustices committed at the bar. The system is decidedly imperfect, but a vast improvement over what came before.
That same squeamishness, it seems, isn’t to be found with respect to health care, since the glaring cruelty of the system (directly a result of the market forces at work) aren’t often given a second look. We’ll educate universally and provide public defenders as a direct answer to cruelty and poverty, but we won’t do the same with pills and physic… ? Why is that, do you suppose?
lightiris says
Can you please be specific here?
dont-get-cute says
deport them all back to lazyland where they came from.
Bob Neer says
Just for the record. It was his lobbying for the federal government to assume state debts from the Revolution, in large part, that led to the creation of a federal debt (and enriched speculators who had purchased much of the state debt for pennies on the dollar). So from a “Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective” he should welcome additional deficit spending.
David says
I suspect Brooks doesn’t know that (or, if he does, he doesn’t agree with that part of Hamiltonianism). Maybe you should shoot him an email.
centralmassdad says
There is nothing I like better than a nice cold beer on a hot day, but 50 beers would be too much and not so pleasant.
Hamilton wanted to establish the credit of the national government, which could only be done by having debt and paying it off. He did not advocate ever-increasing amounts of debt, just because debt is so darned good.
roarkarchitect says
and understood that business or organizations could only grow with a financial system that allowed debt.
tedf says
Hamilton was simply saying that America should honor the debt the states had already incurred, which is different from advocating incurring the debt in the first place. Just saying.
Bob Neer says
I agree most with Roark here. The question is: why did Hamilton want the federal government to assume the debt of the states. Perhaps simply for love of country, and a principled belief in the power of debt to bind together a nation by giving people a stake in its success (no one cares more fervently that the US be able to honor its debts than holders of Treasuries). But possibly also because his friends and patrons in NYC stood to benefit, dare one say it. Ted: technically correct, of course. But since the federal government had no legal obligation to honor the debts the the states, in practice no real difference from incurring new debt … and Hamilton (Brooks?) was all in favor.
petr says
… Ezra Klein does a great job of point out that everything Brooks wants, is already being pursued… by Obama!!!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/is-barack-obama-a-national-greatnesshamiltonian/2011/05/19/AGddnTUH_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein
Brooks is just a complete and utter tool. No other way to put it. He is congenitally incapable of giving Obama even the slightest credit and, so, is reduced to recycling Obama’s agenda as some sort of wish-list he came up with on his own. It’s a particular form of pathological and creepy that, frankly, scares the living daylights out of me. Years ago, it seems to me, this sort of solipsistic ledgerdemaine would have been laughed at by the editors and quickly sent to a sanitorium to languish in obscurity. Nowadays, it’s de rigeur. Sad. Scary.
We should just hook some motors to the caskets of Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow… they have to be doing some several hundred thousand revolutions per minute at the parlous state of journalism.
irishfury says
Aside from the fact that there’s no need to call him a tool, you’re blanket statement about Brooks not giving Obama any credit is ridiculous. It took me three seconds on google to find these articles and as a daily NYT reader I can definitely go back and find more instances where Brooks gives Obama more than his due. That is, unless I am in a particularly languorous mood.
Nice use of the thesaurus.
jconway says
And didn’t dislike his column today, his complaints are always on target, his biggest problem though is that his solutions are either not well thought out platitudes (like today’s) or incredibly terrible ones (at least Ryancare is a plan! John Thune for Prez!). Also his analysis of Hamilton and Burke are quite atrocious. Hamilton was far more important than just an infrastructure fan, his foreign policy (commercial expansion but non-interventionist militarily) is eons away from Brooks’ neoconservatism. Similarly Burke would have been against well intentioned fantasies like the Iraq War or Ryancare just as much as the French Revolution since they uphend the established order and destroy communitarian impulses, respectively. It shows that he was a Maroon writer, one of the worst student papers in America, and that he failed his Classics in Western Political Thought core class.
farnkoff says
In it, they portray Hamilton as a hawk clamoring for war with France. Or course I don’t know how true that was to history, or even to McCulloch’s book, but the unflattering characterization of Hamilton stayed with me. Probably just goes to show one should never get one’s history from HBO.:)
jconway says
Most of the good centrist ideas to rebuild the economy, from the Bowles-Simpson commission, to targeted tax cuts mixed with targeted tax hikes, tying auto stimulus to innovation, tying broader stimulus to infrastructure creation and repair, to a Heritage plan style mandate plan for healthcare have already been adopted by our current Democratic President. Brook’s candidate already exists in the form of Barack Obama who opposes the do nothing Pelosi wing of his own party and the do-terrible things party of his opposition in Congress. Brooks is right its terrible Democrats do not recognize that Medicare and Social Security should be reformed, but he is wrong to give Republicans a pass on their sacred cows and wrong to forget that one significant Democrat, the President, is already in favor of nearly all the reforms he wants.
JimC says
I just don’t know what to say about that. It’s breathtaking.
We can’t be too far off though. During the last election, Brooks quoted a friend as saying, “The only great man in this race is John McCain.”And then of course he got a whole column out of that.