The dog that didn’t bark

The debate over the Republican tax-cut proposal was most revealing for what was missing— serious discussion of our staggering national debt, and how the bill might affect it.

While Democrats veered into fullblown Marxian mode by using terms like “theft” and “looting” to describe the prospect of people being able to keep more of their money, the party once counted on to mind the mint, the GOP, generally failed to ask the first and most important question regarding any spending or tax cut proposal: Can we afford it?

We never expect Democrats to worry about affordability because the idea of government handing out goodies in return for votes constitutes the central pillar of welfare-state liberalism, but Republicans were supposed to be the adults in the room, the misers who hold the line and point out the dangers of deficits and their accumulation over time in the form of national debt.

This isn’t to say that tax cuts should always be opposed on fiscal grounds. The essential logic of the “Laffer Curve”—high tax rates can retard economic growth and thereby actually reduce tax revenue—is difficult to disagree with. We should all also agree that the best means of reducing deficits is the kind of dynamic, growing economy that a reduced tax burden can bring about.

No, the disturbing part of the Republican tax-cut proposal wasn’t the idea of tax cuts per se, or any particular provisions in the bill; it was that the debate over its passage occurred as if a national debt that now ominously exceeds our gross domestic product (GDP) didn’t exist.

There are few countries in history that have found themselves in such a fiscal circumstance that have not eventually experienced severe economic decline and impoverishment, if not for those around today, then for those who come later. Although the phrase “for the children” is usually a tipoff for the arrival of rhetorical demagoguery, expanding array of free stuff, with scant regard for how it will be paid for; they get re-elected by accusing their opponents of wanting to take it away.

Once the goal of a balanced budget loses its primacy in the minds of an increasingly irresponsible electorate, the political calculus inevitably comes to favor those willing to promise the most stuff, deficits and debt be damned.

A sense of shared national purpose gets replaced by “I got mine, Jack, and you’re going to pay for it.”