ConservativeHome's The Republican

DOMA isn't where the fight is

Ryan Streeter

The Pew survey numbers yesterday on generational views of marriage haven’t gotten as much attention as they should, given their confirmation of a trend we all know is real: we are growing more and more into a society that doesn’t believe in marriage.

We could win the DOMA fight and lose the issue. The Pew figures show just how downstream from culture politics are when it comes to views of marriage and family.

Millennials care more about parenting than their GenX forebears, but less about marriage. The percentage of Millennials saying marriage is one of the important things in life dropped to 30 percent from 35 percent among GenXers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the marriage rate has dropped from 29 to 22 percent for those under 29 years old compared to those in the previous generation.

This is where the shifting views of marriage hit the hardest: the belief that marriage isn’t vital to raising children.The report authors write:

Millennials are less likely than older generations to link marriage with parenthood. About a third of Millennials (34%) think that more unmarried couples raising children is a bad thing for society, compared with 45% of those ages 30 and older. Likewise, about six-in-ten (63%) Millennials think that single motherhood is bad for society, compared with seven-in-ten (71%) adults ages 30 and older.

Those over 65 believe 3 to 1 that a child needs a father and mother to grow up happily. Even the boomers, children of the 60s as they are, believe 61 to 34 percent that children need both parents. Among millennials today, the margin is down to 53 to 44 percent.

Pro-family and pro-small enterprise is what we should be about, not only pro-tax cuts, if we are to grow out of our troubles

Ryan Streeter

Gallup's latest poll on job creation summarizes many a complicated policy debate with a few straightforward statistics.

These data show that small business, the real driver of job creation in the United States, is still struggling in ways that should give all us grave concern - and policymakers a kick in the seat to tackle the issue broadly, not just with one or two signature policies such as tax cut extensions (as important and critical as those are). 

Here are the 3 main points anyone who cares about job creation in America needs to see:

1. Jobs ARE being created, but mainly in large companies. 42% of businesses with more than 1,000 employees report they are hiring, and 36% with between 100 and 1,000 say they are hiring. 28% of those with between 10 and 100 employees are hiring.
2. By comparison, only 9% of companies with fewer than 10 employees are hiring. They are the only category of businesses that reports trimming more jobs than they are adding.
3. The federal government is also adding more employees than it is letting go, by large margins. They match big business, in fact, with 42% of federal employees reporting that their particular agency is hiring more people than it is letting go.

Now, these survey results are based on a poll of employees. Not all employees will actually know their organization's human resources numbers, though we should expect that employees of small businesses would have the best grasp of their companies' situation. In any case the Gallup results are a clear gauge of a stark reality. Small businesses show that the growth element in our economy is weak and troubled. What is the American economy without its chief engine of growth?

The health of the American economy and society should chiefly be measured by two fundamental units - the family and the small business. 

All of our policy decisions should be assessed by their affect on the health and disposable income of average households and the viability of small enterprises. In my view, this is what differentiates all of us who call ourselves "capitalists" or "proponents of free markets." Policy should bolster the small, energetic units of American growth rather than big banks or big corporations. Every talking head on the right in Washington voices support for small businesses, but not all of them mean it.

Therefore, as Nick Schulz points out on today's Platform, without a broader growth agenda than tax cuts and fiscal stability, the GOP will not gain the political backing it needs to pursue a broader agenda. Which is why it needs to start talking about that agenda now.

A starting point would be tax policy that passes "the Douthat test," as I argued here last week. And then, we need to start laying out the specific elements of an alternative to Obamacare, since many of the best ideas out there - changing the tax treatment of health insurance premiums, allowing purchases across state lines, savings accounts - are favorable to small businesses and families.  

Instead of framing these issues along with tax cuts and deficit reduction as separate issues, they should all be framed together as a pro-family, pro-small enterprise agenda.

Party of ideas? Only if they pass the "Douthat test"

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.