Contra David, there is nothing hypocritical about Scott Brown taking advantage of the current health care law while trying to repeal it.
I would love to see the home interest mortgage deduction removed from the tax code. It’s bad policy. Until the deduction is removed, though, I intend to take full advantage of it. I continue to take the deduction because laws are meaningful as they require collective action and create collective benefits. My taking the deduction while others don’t would be a heroic act of insignificance.
Here’s another example: how many Democratic candidates (incumbent or otherwise) who seek the repeal of the Bush tax cuts sent in a check for the extra they would be paying if the pre-Bush rates were in effect today? Zero. Are they hypocrites? Of course not.
The real problem with Scott Brown is his lack of empathy. The real question is not why is his daughter taking advantage of one of the law’s benefits, but what would he do if he were successful in repealing the benefit? You’ve seen his tax returns. He’d either pay to insure her or he’d be there as a resource in the unlikely event that she needed expensive medical care. (She’s 23 and demographically not likely to incur much in the way of medical expense. Not insuring her is a reasonable bet.) No significant skin off his barn-coat-covered back.
Not everyone in such a comfortable position. That makes Scott Brown callous, not hypocritical.
Sean,
I can see the point you are trying to make here, and lord knows David needs no help defending himself or his arguments, but I think you’re half wrong and half right here. You’re certainly right on Brown’s lack of empathy — a fact that is underscored every time he talks about his Dickensian upbringing and then turns around and votes against an unemployment insurance extension.
However, with respect to the hypocrisy point, I think you’re wrong. Your examples about the mortgage interest deduction and the Bush tax cuts aren’t a particularly good comparison as you formulate them. In your examples, you seem to be suggesting that the taxpayer or the home owner may, as a policy matter, think the tax cuts are a bad idea or the interest deduction is a bad idea, but that the taxpayer or the home owner takes advantage of those policies nonetheless.
The dimension you’re missing is the loud, proud, chest-thumping, throat-clearing advocacy at work in Brown’s case. What makes Brown a hypocrite isn’t the mere fact that he’s against the Affordable Care Act, and he subsequently takes advantage of some provision of it, but rather the volume and the rigor with which he opposed it, followed by the fact that he then takes advantage of it.
He wasn’t a guy who quietly opposed the ACA on policy grounds and then quiescently went about his business. This is a guy who erected an entire late-stage campaign about being the “41st vote against the ACA.”
To me, this is a qualitative difference that vindicates David’s hypocrisy argument.
He was really, really, really insistent?
How many reallys make you a hypocrite? I’m pretty sure that there a ton of top-bracket earners in the Democratic House caucus who railed against extension of the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Were they only one-really insistent?
Let’s put it another way. One of the things that made Ted Kennedy and makes John Kerry admirable was/is their continued willingness to vote against their own self-interest on matters of taxing the wealthy. Scott Brown’s family receives, as is his right as someone governed by the duly enacted laws of our country, a benefit. He’s willing to see that benefit revoked, contrary to his clear self-interest.
The hypocrite attack makes for some cute buzz, but it’s fundamentally unsound.