Ryan Streeter
Reminders that Republicans like to be known as the "party of ideas" abounded this past fall in the run-up to the election. But this was mainly because observers used it as a contrast with the "party of no" they typically accused the GOP of being.
To some degree, ordinary voters think Republicans fell down on the "party of ideas" job, too. In the ConservativeHome Republican Panel, a survey of more than 2,200 self-identified conservatives, 27% of respondents said that failing to be the party of ideas was one way that Republicans have been letting voters down. Higher income voters were slightly more inclined to make this charge than lower income voters, but overall, the percentage is fairly even regardless of income group (unlike, say, Sarah Palin's favorability, which gets lower the higher income grows).
Now, issues such as getting careless with spending taxpayer dollars and letting government grow topped the list, which is no surprise given what drove people to the polls. But when more than 1 in 4 people think the GOP is out of ideas, that's saying something.
To rehabilitate their rightful place as the party of ideas, the GOP leadership should show some creativity in tackling the problems on the minds of the voters who just gave them a majority in the House.
I propose that they try to pass the "Douthat test." In his Nov. 7 NYT column, Ross Douthat identifies 3 overlapping crises for which it is not evident the GOP has a plan:
The short-term challenge of a jobless recovery, the long-term crisis of entitlement spending and, in the medium term, an economy that wasn’t delivering for the middle class even before the financial crisis struck. The Democratic Party may have the wrong answers to these problems. But the Republican Party as an institution often seems to have no answers whatsoever.
This strikes me as a pretty good starting point for evaluating the domestic policy agenda of the new House majority. Now, we all now the constitutional and political limitations to what Republicans can get done in the next 2 years, but nothing is stopping them from playing a big game and proposing bold legislation they know they can't pass - as a way to lay down the boundaries of the future debate.
Since Paul Ryan's roadmap hits Douthat's second and long-term crisis pretty well, let's look at something that gets at numbers 1 and 3. Yuval Levin writes today about Robert Stein's essay on taxes and the family. Stein has a few proposals that Republican leaders could embrace to show that they want to satisfy the present public appetite for tax reform.
- Cut the effective tax rate on capital investment by getting rid of double taxation and using a better formula than the slow capital depreciation formula in the tax code. This would encourage new investment equity, increase wages, create jobs, and heighten competitiveness.
- Get rid of the AMT, eliminate all deductions except for mortgage interest and charity, and implement 2 income brackets at 15% and 35%.
- Replace the standard deduction and personal exemption with a $2000 tax filer credit and a $4000-per-child credit, which would be especially beneficial to families.
Now, as Stein points out, this plan would end up hitting high-earners harder than others, especially those from high-tax states.
But this may be a price to pay, especially if it acts as an incentive for high tax states to reform themselves (take note California!) to keep a greater share of their affluent residents from running away. In the end, we need creative policy ideas like this to free up families and businesses to start deploying their own capital in productive enterprise. This would get us part of the way toward passing the Douthat Test.
Let's see which GOP leader can put together something that passes the Douthat Test first.
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