Starving Uncle Sam
by Tom Sullivan
Death by a thousand cuts is a kind of political strategy movement conservatives have deployed against adversaries for decades. Too bad they also deploy it against the country whose flag they display on their lapels.
Thomas Edsall this morning examines the effects of Republican Party members toeing to rigid conservative orthodoxy. Besides opposition to any restraints on firearms, and denial of climate change and abortion rights, any measure that raises revenue to maintain the country they swore an oath to serve is anathema.
The beast they are determined to slowly starve in pursuit of ideological purity has a nickname: Uncle Sam. Edsall writes:
A majority of economists surveyed in 2012 by the University of Chicago found that, despite Republican demands for austerity, the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus legislation significantly reduced unemployment. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill on Feb. 13, 2009, as did 38 of 41 Republican senators on the same day.
Republican opposition to raising taxes, in turn, resulted in a decade-long delay before the enactment last year of long-term Highway Trust Fund legislation. During the delay, the nation’s infrastructure continued to decay, with one out of nine bridges considered structurally deficient; the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that airport overcrowding and delays cost the nation $22 billion annually; and 42 percent of major urban highways were congested.
Similarly, Republican cuts to the I.R.S. budget have resulted in a loss of tax revenue. In an April 2015 speech, John Koskinen, the commissioner of the I.R.S., noted that over the previous five years, as the number of taxpayers has grown, the I.R.S. budget was pared by $1.2 billion (to $10.9 billion from $12.1 billion), its lowest level since 1998, adjusted for inflation. In addition to a sharp reduction in the quality of services to taxpayers — the I.R.S. in 2015 answered only 37 percent of taxpayer phone inquiries — Koskinen said that “the drop in audit and collection case closures this year will translate into a loss for the government of at least $2 billion in revenue that otherwise would have been collected.”
Those lost funds might have supported providing safe drinking water in Flint or replacing weakened bridges in Minneapolis, or might have been used to support research by the Centers for Disease Control to fight Zika virus-caused microcephaly.
Edsall found that since the early George W. Bush administration, favorability ratings for Republicans in Congress have fallen from the high 40s to mid-50s to 14 percent last year. When you are dedicated to training voters to hate the government and you are the government, you reap what you sow.
The fact is that as political orthodoxy matures, it calcifies, imposing more costs than benefits. Politicians who submit to such doctrinal pressures threaten their own authenticity.
But that's their problem. Authenticity for Republicans is Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. It's Ted Cruz and Virginia Foxx and Jeff Sessions and Joni Ernst and Steve King and Trey Gowdy and Louie Gohmert and ....