Like living with a six-year-old

PETER: I, uh, I don’t like my job. I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.
JOANNA: You’re just not gonna go?
PETER: Yeah.
JOANNA: Won’t you get fired?
PETER: I don’t know. But I really don’t like it so I’m not gonna go…
JOANNA: So what are you going to do about money and bills?
PETER: Y’know, I never really liked paying bills? I don’t think I’ll do that either.

Source: Republican Party Platform

How much room for compromise is there with the legions who lose their minds when they hear this:

“Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you,” Sen. Clinton said. “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

For this, she’s called a Marxist. Excuse me, but isn’t “taking things away from you on behalf of the common good” an unflowery but straightforward description of taxation? I don’t see why this description should be remotely controversial. I don’t like paying taxes either, but what, exactly, is the other option? Is anarcho-libertarianism on the ballot?

There are more reasonable people who acknowledge that taxes aren’t going away. They just want to protect the Bush tax cut from any proposed rollbacks. They’d rather close the deficit with spending cuts. And which party, exactly, do they believe is going to enact these spending cuts? From Slate:

It’s all the more extraordinary that when Bush got asked about his spending habit on Meet the Press, this was his answer:

If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

That isn’t even close to being true. Under Bush, overall discretionary spending (i.e., with defense spending included) has increased every single year. It’s now 31 percent higher than it was when Bush arrived.

But perhaps Bush meant to say, “domestic discretionary spending.” Well, that, too, has increased every single year of Bush’s presidency, and, as previously noted, is now 25 percent higher than it was when Bush arrived.

It seems almost gratuitous to add that in the last year of President Clinton’s term, discretionary spending was up not 15 percent, but 3 percent, and that domestic discretionary spending was up not 15 percent, but 5 percent.

The Bush tax cuts are the largest cause of an unsustainable structural budget deficit. Even Bruce Bartlett in the National Review acknowledges that some tax increases will be necessary. When I hear someone argue against the repeal of any of Bush’s tax cuts, they’ve basically got to use one of the following rationales:

(a) I believe that large, structural, long-term deficits don’t matter.

(b) I believe that we are on the verge of the greatest period of economic growth in American history.

(c) The Republican party, whom I trust more than the Democrats to reduce spending, has actually grossly expanded domestic spending while enjoying total control of the federal government. Nonetheless, I believe that my small-government ideals are about to become a reality.

(d) I believe that the United States will soon become a Saudi-level oil exporter, and the oil revenues will cover the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of programs that we’re not willing to pay for in taxes.

(e) The government should pay for goods and services in wishes and fairy dust.

Is there an (f)? Comments are open.

Andrew Sullivan, who wrote such a childish snit that he issued a rare semi-apology the next day, says:

I’d cut spending before I touched any tax increases. Why cannot Hillary end agricultural subsidies, abolish corporate tax shelters, or means-test Social Security and Medicare? That would be for the common good. But it’s easier to raise taxes.

As a bad liberal, I would agree with any of those policy prescriptions, including the means-testing of benefits. (I doubt that they would come close to closing the deficit, but that’s another story). Still, it takes a special kind of pundit to castigate Hillary for her failure to single-handedly enact them.

Sully, your team has the ball. They don’t share your goals. They haven’t pursued your initiatives. Quite the contrary; they’ve dramatically increased agricultural subsidies, fought to protect corporate tax shelters, and added a massive drug benefit for Medicare.

I don’t mean to promote Democrats as the small-government party. I think that they would have done a much better job with tax shelters, and I think that their version of the drug benefit would have done a more rational job of controlling costs. On the other hand, they weren’t exactly laying down in the street to stop the farm bill, and they would probably have proposed a more generous drug benefit if they had been in power. History is showing pretty clearly that the only method of slowing the growth of government is not Republicanism, but gridlock. (Vote Kerry.)

In the end, we’ve basically got one party which generally accepts that we need to collect enough taxes to pay for the government that actually exists. And, we’ve got another party only seems willing to collect enough taxes to pay for the government that it wishes existed, but isn’t willing to fight for. Judging from the comments that I’m reading on other blogs (and the comments that I anticipate here), a lot of voters are much more concerned with Hillary’s choice of pronouns and the deconstruction of the phrase “common good” than they are with paying our damn bills. It’s no way to run a country.