Remember Paul Ryan? The
speaker of the House used to be a media darling, lionized as the epitome of the
Serious, Honest Conservative — never mind those of us who actually looked at
the numbers in his budgets and concluded that he was a con man. These days, of
course, he is overshadowed by the looming Trumpocalypse.
But while Donald Trump
could win the White House — or lose so badly that even our rotten-borough
system of congressional districts, which heavily favors the G.O.P., delivers
the House to the Democrats — the odds are that come January, Hillary Clinton
will be president, and Mr. Ryan still speaker. So I was interested to read what
Mr. Ryan said in a recent interview with John Harwood. What has he learned from
recent events?
Like just about
everyone in the Republican establishment, Mr. Ryan is in denial about the roots
of Trumpism, about the extent to which the party deliberately cultivated anger
and racial backlash, only to lose control of the monster it created. But what I
found especially striking were his comments on tax policy. I know, boring — but
indulge me here. There’s a larger moral.
You might think that
Republican thought leaders would be engaged in some soul-searching about their
party’s obsession with cutting taxes on the wealthy. Why do candidates who
inveigh against the evils of budget deficits and federal debt feel obliged to
propose huge high-end tax cuts — much bigger than those of George W. Bush —
that would eliminate trillions in revenue?
And economics aside,
why such a commitment to a policy that has never had much support even from the
party’s own base, and appears even more politically suspect in the face of a
populist uprising?
But here’s what Mr.
Ryan said about all those tax cuts for the top 1 percent: “I do not like the
idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you’re talking about is
what we call static distribution. It’s a ridiculous notion.”
Aha. The income
mobility zombie strikes again.
Ever since income
inequality began its sharp rise in the 1980s, one favorite conservative excuse
has been that it doesn’t mean anything, because economic positions change all
the time. People who are rich this year might not be rich next year, so the gap
between the rich and the rest doesn’t matter, right?
Well, it’s true that
people move up and down the economic ladder, and apologists for inequality love
to cite statistics showing that many people who are in the top 1 percent in any
given year are out of that category the next year.
But a closer look at
the data shows that there is less to this observation than it seems. These
days, it takes an income of around $400,000 a year to put you in the top 1
percent, and most of the fluctuation in incomes we see involves people going
from, say, $350,000 to $450,000 or vice versa. As one comprehensive survey put
it, “The majority of economic mobility occurs over fairly small spans of the
distribution.” Average incomes over multiple years are almost as unequally
distributed as incomes in any given year, which means that tax cuts that mainly
benefit the rich are indeed targeted at a small group of people, not the public
at large.
And here’s the thing:
This isn’t a new observation. As it happens, I personally took on the very same
argument Mr. Ryan is making — and showed that it was wrong — almost 25 years
ago. Yet the man widely considered the G.O.P.’s intellectual leader is still
making the same old claims.
O.K., maybe I’m just
indulging a pet peeve by focusing on this particular subject. Yet the persistence
of the income mobility zombie, like the tax-cuts-mean-growth zombie (which
should have been killed, once and for all, by the debacles in Kansas and
Louisiana), is part of a pattern.
Appalled Republicans
may rail against Donald Trump’s arrogant ignorance. But how different, really,
are the party’s mainstream leaders? Their blinkered view of the world has the
veneer of respectability, may go along with an appearance of thoughtfulness,
but in reality it’s just as impervious to evidence — maybe even more so,
because it has the power of groupthink behind it.
This is why you
shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio
succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it
needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old
defunct orthodoxy. Oh, and a last-minute turn to someone like John Kasich
would, in its own way, have similar implications.
What we’re getting
instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the
political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to
rethink its premises. That’s a good thing — or it would be, if it didn’t also
come with the risk of President Trump.
