The GOP rejects conservatism
There is a structural flaw in modern capitalism. Tremendous income gains are going to those in the top 20 per cent, but prospects are diminishing for those in the middle and working classes.
Conservative intellectuals were slow to understand the seriousness of this structural problem, but over the past few years they have begun to grapple with the consequences.
Conservative income redistribution doesn’t look like liberal redistribution. Conservatives in the United States tend to like their redistribution done at the local level, and they like to use market-friendly mechanisms, like child tax credits, mobility vouchers and wage subsidies. But the intent is the same – to give those who are struggling more security and opportunity.
Conservative redistribution extends to healthcare. Over the past several years, many plans have emerged from the various Right-leaning think tanks that imagine consumer-driven healthcare that also has universal or near universal coverage.
These plans, from places like the American Enterprise Institute, use tax credits or pre-funded health savings accounts or some other method to give middle- and working-class people coverage, while reducing regulations and improving incentives throughout the system.
Republican politicians could have picked up one of these plans when they set out to repeal Obamacare. They could have created a better system that did not punish the poor. But, there are two crucial differences between the conservative policy johnnies and Republican politicians.
First, conservative policy intellectuals tend to have accepted the fact that American society is coming apart and that measures need to be taken to assist the working class. Republican politicians show no awareness of this fact. Second, conservative writers and intellectuals have a vision for how they want American society to be in the 21st century. Republican politicians have a vision of how they want American government to be in the 21st century.
Republican politicians believe that government should tax people less. The Senate bill would eliminate the 3.8 per cent tax on investment income for those making over $250,000. Republican politicians believe that open-ended entitlements should be cut. The Senate healthcare plan would throw 15 million people off Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Is there a vision of society underlying those choices? Not really. The current Republican Party has iron, dogmatic rules about the role of government, but no vision about America.
Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t really replace the Obama vision with some alternative. They just accept the basic structure of Obamacare and cut it back some.
Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t argue for their plans. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to the Aspen Ideas Festival to make the case for the GOP approach. It’s not that he had bad arguments; he had no arguments.
Because Republicans have no national vision, they seem largely uninterested in the actual effects their legislation would have on the country at large. This Senate bill would be completely unworkable because anybody with half a brain would get insurance only when they got sick. Worse, this bill takes all the devastating trends afflicting the middle and working classes and it makes them worse.
As the CBO indicated, the Senate plan would throw 22 million people off the insurance rolls. It would send them to private insurance plans that they could not afford to buy. Under the Senate bill, deductibles for poor families would be more than half of their annual income. The plans are so incompetently and cruelly designed that as the CBO put it, ‘‘few low-income people would purchase any plan’’.
This is not a conservative vision of American society. It’s a vision rendered cruel by its obliviousness.