Ryan Streeter
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The best part of the lousy economy we’re living in is the small, but renewed, interest among conservatives in spurring not only growth, but growth that benefits middle class America.
Our troubled economy affects all of us, but it is hitting middle class families the hardest. It’s possible that if you have a college degree and work in a ZIP code with an upper middle class median income, you don’t even know anyone who’s unemployed. That’s because our fouled-up economy isn’t taking a toll on you in the same way as it is on those middle class ZIP codes, where everyone knows someone who is out of work.
So it’s good to be reading these words:
National Review editors, today:
Middle-class prosperity — a big part of the American dream that Republicans rightly say they want to restore — requires more than growth, as important as it is. We cannot claim to have a ready-made agenda to achieve these goals. Our hope is to stimulate conservative thought about how to reach them. But it seems clear that the tax code as currently structured is an obstacle to them.
Ross Douthat today, on Tim Pawlenty’s Chicago speech:
Somewhere, buried in the middle of the address, there’s a line that speaks directly to the middle class: Pawlenty is talking about his plan for a rate-lowering, base-broadening tax reform, and he pitches this as a “one-third cut in the bottom rate … to allow younger — middle — and lower-income families to save and build wealth.” But you’ll search the rest of the speech in vain for anything else that’s addressed so explicitly to middle class concerns. Instead, most of Pawlenty’s agenda is a mix of “half-remembered bits of Reaganism,” transparent gimmicks (a balanced-budget amendment that caps spending at 18 percent of G.D.P.) and straightforward magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts.
Ramesh Ponnuru, on Tuesday, in Bloomberg:
In recent years, though, Republicans have tried to cut taxes for corporations and high earners without doing anything for the middle class. (Anything direct, that is: The middle class was told it would benefit from higher growth.) It’s not surprising, then, that the Republican advantage on taxes has declined -- or that in recent elections, most voters haven’t told pollsters that Republicans are “in touch” with people like them.
Republicans haven’t learned the lessons of their success under Reagan or their failure under Bush. The country’s fiscal straits may make it difficult for Republicans to devise conservative ways of responding to the economic challenges that middle-class Americans now face.
But it must be said that they don’t appear to be trying very hard.
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