Why the GOP's Starve-the-Beast Strategy Is Suicide [View All]

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/when-the-starved-beast-bites-back


When the Starved Beast Bites Back
Republicans are trying to create a fiscal crisis they may not survive.


Ever since George W. Bush massively cut taxes back in 2001, squandering much of the $5.6 trillion, ten-year surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton, liberals have assumed that the fiscal game was rigged. Conservatives had been explicit about their starve-the-beast strategy—the practice of creating large deficits through tax cuts in order to force future spending cuts. By playing along, the thinking went, Democrats would only further enable irresponsible behavior—a bit like negotiating with terrorists. Why kill yourself balancing the budget, as Bill Clinton did, if the next Republican is just going to slash taxes again?

The fear of conservative high jinks persists to this day, which is one reason liberals have responded coolly to President Obama’s deficit-cutting commission. In fact, many suspect the right is up to something even more sinister—a “doubling down on starve-the-beast,” as Paul Krugman put it recently. “Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state,” Krugman wrote. “So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe.”

Krugman is almost certainly onto something. I suspect, as he does, that Republicans believe precipitating a fiscal crisis will force Democrats to roll back entitlement spending (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), which would be both politically unpopular and the realization of the right’s dearest policy fantasy. It’s an altogether brilliant, if diabolical, plan. Except for one minor flaw: There’s a good chance it could vaporize the GOP.

The thing to keep in mind about economic crises is that parties who solve them tend to survive and even prosper over the long-term, even if they sometimes suffer short-term pain. Conversely, parties who fail to solve them tend to face political calamity. The case of Democrats and Republicans during the Great Depression is the most familiar example, but hardly the only one. In the last decade-and-a-half, persistent economic crises have sent ruling cliques and parties into the wilderness in Indonesia, Argentina, and Turkey. Even in Japan, which effectively had a one-party monopoly since the 1950s, the recurring economic problems of recent years have given the opposition DPJ a chance to govern. The failure of Democrats in the United States and Labour in Britain to address the economic sclerosis of the 1970s helped lay the groundwork for the conservative ascendance of the 1980s.

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So, yes, like Krugman, I’m concerned that the Republican Party really might cast us into the abyss as part of some spectacularly misguided political strategy. But the one thing I’m emphatically not worried about is that it might somehow help the GOP.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic.