The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, caused some controversy yesterday when he appeared to say that letting the Bush tax cuts expire would not be a violation of a pledge lawmakers took not to raise taxes. In an effort to clear up any confusion, Norquist took to today’s New York Times with a column that is rich with poor logic and tautological reasoning.
The reason this matters is that, by Norquist’s count, “236 current members of the House of Representatives and 41 current senators” have taken his Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Both numbers are more than adequate to block the passage of any tax hikes in their respective houses of Congress. Before I get started with Norquist’s logic, I’ll give you the answer to the Bush tax cuts question. The way the pledge works is that Americans for Tax Reform takes a look at bills pending before Congress, and if they think a particular bill will raise a tax, they will inform congressmembers that they will be “scoring” the bill. In other words, a vote for that bill will be considered a violation of the pledge. But, because the Bush tax cuts were ostensibly designed to be temporary, they can disappear without any vote on any bill. If there is no bill, there can be no vote, and the pledge only deals with votes. So, a failure to prevent the lapsing of the Bush tax cuts would not “score” against a congressperson’s anti-tax record. However, if the Bush tax cuts were to lapse not through inaction but, rather, were eliminated as part of some grand bargain, then there would be a vote, and that vote would be scored. Got that? Okay, let’s move on.
When the government is running a deficit, it is spending more than it is bringing in in revenues. The government can eliminate a deficit by spending less, taxing more, or some combination of the two. But Norquist attempts to define this basic reality out of existence.
The problem to be solved is not the deficit; it is overspending. Federal spending in the 2008 fiscal year was $2.9 trillion, and Washington will now spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government. Advocates of larger government prefer to talk about deficits rather than spending. Why? Because there are two solutions to a deficit problem: spend less or raise taxes. The issue, in other words, isn’t the pledge; it’s Washington’s inability to deal with its own overspending. There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less.
Notice what he did. He said there are two solutions to the deficit problem, and then in the next sentence he said there is only one solution to the deficit problem. In logic, that is what we call begging the question. This occurs when the conclusion you desire is presented as a premise. Another potential objection is that Norquist has presented two contradictory premises. Both of them cannot be true, and therefore he has presented an invalid argument. Either way, his logic is fatally flawed. He simply asserts that the only way to close the deficit is to cut spending, but knows, and even openly admits, that this is not the case.
Let’s look at another part of his column. Here he is talking about the difference between voting to raise a tax and voting to eliminate a tax subsidy.
Others have tried to redefine “tax increase,” specifically by arguing that eliminating a tax credit, exclusion or deduction in order to rake in more tax revenue should not count as a tax hike. The theory is that any dollar the government failed to take from you in taxes had in fact been given to you in a spending program. By this reasoning, the deduction-killing Alternative Minimum Tax is not a tax hike — a cruel joke on the millions of Americans who get hit by it every year. When a mugger passes you on the street leaving you unmolested, he did not in fact give you your wallet.
This is a more complicated argument to unwind. It has the implied premise that all money owned by a person or corporation belongs to them and that any taxation is the one-to-one equivalent of robbery. If you accept that premise, then all taxation is a crime. Something must be wrong with his reasoning. To make it simpler to think about this, imagine that we had a flat income tax of 15% instead of our progressive system. In this case, each individual would have the implied ownership of 85% of their earnings. Now, imagine that certain people, e.g., soy bean farmers, got to keep 95% of their earnings while you did not enjoy any similar subsidy. Does it still make sense to say that just because the government didn’t take that last 10% from the soy bean farmers that they didn’t put cash in the pockets of the farmers?
What Norquist is saying is that everyone who enjoys some preferential treatment in the tax code is owed that preferential treatment in perpetuity. They not only deserved to get that tax preference in the first place, but any attempt to take it away is the equivalent of a mugging. It’s hard to even construct this argument in Symbolic Logic because it isn’t built on any coherent premises. The root of the problem is a lack of clear principles. While I can make a premise that all tax levies are crimes, even Norquist is unwilling to argue that in a serious manner. And, once we agree that some taxes are necessary, we need some theory of fairness. Where Norquist’s argument fails most spectacularly is that he doesn’t have a theory of fairness at all. One could argue that a progressive system is fairest, or that a flat system is fairest. But no one can argue that a system with preferential tax subsidies is fairest, as it clearly benefits a small class of people at the expense of everyone else. Unlike the flat and progressive views of taxation, subsidies aren’t based on any idea of fairness, but on achieving some change in behavior.
There is one final part of Norquist’s column that I’d like to address. He says that the Republicans have a “commitment to shrinking the size of the federal government” and he says that the standoff over the debt limit is about reducing the deficit. When the Bush administration was in office, Dick Cheney openly asserted that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” And that is how the Republicans behaved. Every year from 2003 on, the Congress passed supplemental war-funding bills that were not paid for. These bills increased our deficit. They passed a Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit that was funded on borrowed money. Why is there no pledge to not spend borrowed money on bombs and pills?
The truth is that the Republicans care about taxes, not the deficit. The last Republican president to care about the deficit was Poppy Bush, and he lost his job because he broke his pledge to not raise taxes. That’s quite ironic considering the headline of Norquist’s column is Read My Lips: No New Taxes.
Poppy Bush did the responsible thing and put us on a path to prosperity in the 1990’s. Bill Clinton followed up on Poppy’s work to put us in a fiscally sound position. They had a lot of hard work to do to clean up after St. Ronnie’s mess. Obama is now trying to do the same thing. But rather than recognizing the available wisdom from our recent past, the Norquist-Republicans are trying to destroy the economy on purpose, not to reduce the deficit, but to keep taxes low for rich people.
