John Harwood says the Republican Party’s current opposition to popular “Obamacare” subsidies for millions of Americans is on track with the party’s stubborn grip on the wrong side of arguments throughout history.
“They said Washington lacked the competence to run [the Social Security System], that the nation couldn’t afford it, that it would impoverish the working class,” Harwood tells Zeteo. “A ‘cruel hoax,’ declared the Republican Party’s leader.”
But in 90 years of operation, Social Security has cut the poverty rate among senior citizens by four-fifths, and it never failed to deliver promised benefits. That didn’t stop the party from using the same “swing-and-miss hysteria” against the creation of medical insurance for the elderly, with conservatives describing Medicare as a “step toward totalitarianism.”
“Their pattern repeats again and again,” said Harwood. “The party that loathes government decries programs to solve social problems as dangerous, costly, and futile. Which leaves cutting taxes as its prescription for any ailment — a prescription that consistently fails to deliver.”
Research from Co-Equal pertaining to Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, and the Reagan and Trump tax cuts was consistent in that doomsaying about major new programs, and cheerleading about reducing tax rates, did not pan out.
Republicans dealt the Affordable Care Act the same predictable “Chicken Little” treatment, said Harwood, and they also “put on their fright wigs” about Wall Street regulation, claiming tougher oversight would harm the economy, increase market volatility, inhibit borrowing, institutionalize bailouts, and create a "super-bureaucracy."
But what followed the passage of the Democratic Dodd-Frank financial industry regulation bill was the longest streak of monthly job growth in American history, as well as expanded small business lending and consumer credit, and reduced bank failures. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) obtained $21 billion in compensation for 200 million Americans preyed upon by financial firms.
Such successes have not stopped hysterical conservatives from “making fools of themselves,” said Harwood. “Before bipartisan opposition intervened, Elon Musk’s reckless “Department of Government Efficiency” sought to slash PEPFAR funding. It crippled the CFPB, which assisted so many in the GOP’s working-class base. At a Cabinet meeting this week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins even declared that she feels "gratitude and joy" from cutting food stamp benefits.
The truth, according to Harwood, is that the modern GOP relentlessly seeks to reduce the tax burden on the most affluent Americans because the affluent run the GOP. Admitting this doesn’t win votes, however, so Republicans use better-sounding pitches, like “tax cuts will lift average families, create well-paying jobs, and boost economic growth — enough to increase, rather than decrease, government revenues.”
But the tax cut claims keep falling flat, with the strongest sustained growth of recent decades occurring in the late 1990s after Democratic President Bill Clinton raised taxes, said Harwood. Job creation under Democratic administrations has far outpaced that of Republican administrations. For the last half-century, every Democratic president left office with a lower deficit than he inherited as a share of the economy; every Republican president departed with a higher deficit.
“These facts don’t move Republicans now in power,” said Harwood. “Their patrons are too demanding, their ideology too calcified, their MAGA faithful too compliant, their information sources too detached from reality.”
“But reality can shove them out of power,” added Harwood. “Americans outside the MAGA bubble know that Trump, while enriching himself in office, has not reduced the prices they pay. They know that jobs have grown less plentiful. They know his deportation thugs keep brutalizing peaceable immigrants because they see the videos. They know he isn’t focused on them.”
Read the Zeteo substack at this link with a subscription.