The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

How To Replace the Payroll Tax

If I were a true policy salesman, my Sunday column making the case for extending the payroll tax holiday in the hopes of eventually doing away with payroll taxes altogether would have come equipped with a clever-sounding argument for why payroll tax abolition would somehow magically pay for itself. Alas for the idea’s political prospects, I eschewed free-lunchism and just declined to elaborate on how such a tax reform might be paid for. But happily, Reihan Salam and Dylan Matthews have weighed in with some thoughts on just that subject.

Basically, per Matthews’ calculations, to completely replace the Social Security portion of the payroll tax (which was the focus of my op-ed), you would need just south of a trillion dollars in revenue every year for the next decade. To get that from the tax system as it currently exists, you’d need to let the Bush tax cuts expire and purge the tax code of nearly every credit and deduction. Alternatively, if you were willing to think more outside the existing policy box, you could institute a Value-Added Tax, perhaps paired with a carbon tax — but the VAT rate would have to be as high as 10-12 percent.

These are expensive propositions, obviously. Read more…

Bob Corker and the Romney Road Not Taken

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, has earned a round of media attention this week for sketching out a potential tax reform/entitlement reform compromise in the Washington Post. Here’s the meat of his proposed grand bargain:

The proposal includes pro-growth federal tax reform, which generates more static revenue — mostly from very high-income Americans — by capping federal deductions at $50,000 without raising tax rates. It mandates common-sense reforms to the federal workforce, which will help bring its compensation in line with private-sector benefits, and implements a chained consumer price index across the government, a more accurate indicator of inflation. It also includes comprehensive Medicare reform that keeps in place fee-for-service Medicare without capping growth, competing side by side with private options that seniors can choose instead if they wish. Coupled with gradual age increases within Medicare and Social Security; the introduction of means testing; increasing premiums ever so slightly for those making more than $50,000 a year in retirement; and ending a massive “bed tax” gimmick the states use in Medicaid to bilk the federal government of billions, this reform would put our country on firmer financial footing and begin to vanquish our long-term deficit.

I’ve seen a few people describe this as basically Mitt Romney’s taxes-and-entitlements plan, now “made flesh and dwelling among us,” as National Review’s Dan Foster puts it. But that isn’t quite right, because of course the Romney agenda included an expensive across-the-board rate cut as well, which in turn became the basis for the Obama White House’s sly and effective insistence that Romney would have to ultimately raise taxes on the middle class, via deduction caps and the like, to make his math add up.

I think it’s clear enough that Romney didn’t want that implausible rate cut. Read more…

Can We Be Sweden?

My colleague Paul Krugman has written an interesting response to my Sunday column, which pushed back against “winning the future” triumphalism on the left by noting the emergent Democratic majority’s roots in what I described as “social disintegration” and “economic fear.” Krugman agrees with the second half of that description, but argues that the economic factors vastly oughtweigh the social ones:

The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more insecure at any given point of time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. Our industrial structure is probably less stable than it was — you can’t count on today’s big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job — a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan — have been going away across the board.

… And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k), or make insurance affordable on the individual market.

So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?

I agree with quite a bit of this. The signal failure of Republican economic policy since the 1990s has been the absence of an agenda — apart from the temporary ascendance of “compassionate conservatism” — addressed to the turbulence that the Reagan revolution helped unleash, and the pressure on middle and working class wages created by the combination of global competition and surging health care costs. Amid such stresses, mere social conservatism is not enough: As Noah Millman of the American Conservative put it recently, “a marriage culture requires a material basis” that seems out of reach for too many Americans.

Where I part company with my colleague, though, is on the question of whether the existing American welfare state is basically sound and needs only to be expanded to meet these challenges, or whether we should be looking to prune and restructure in some arenas (entitlements, in particular) even as we try to address insecurity in others. I worry more than Krugman does (at least at the moment) about American economic growth in the shadow of our long-term deficits, more than he does about American competitiveness in a world where taxes and spending rise much higher than their post-1960s norm, and much more about some of the negative feedback loops that large welfare states tend to set in motion — where old-age spending weighs on working-age families, and falling birth rates undercut the basic demographic foundation of the system. Which is why I tend to think we should be trying to hit a kind of “small government egalitarian” sweet spot on these issues, instead of just letting the welfare state grow apace: We need to experiment policies that raise the returns to work for American families (whether that means a new child tax credit, an expanded earned income tax credit, a permanent payroll tax cut, further reforms to the health insurance marketplace, or something else entirely), but these policies need need to be accompanied by major entitlement reform and spending restraint in other areas as well.

I also disagree with my colleague that “nothing” about people’s personal choices can mitigate the problems associated with economic insecurity. Read more…

Marco Rubio and the Age of the Earth

There has been some attention paid, predictably enough, to Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s response to a GQ interviewer’s question about the age of the Earth. Here are the remarks themselves:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?
Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

So, a few points. First, this is pretty plainly a cautious politician’s answer, not a true-believing Young-Earth Creationist’s. The question has a “gotcha” edge: It drops out of the blue in the midst of the interview, and it’s clearly designed to get Rubio to either take a swipe at the 40-plus percent of Americans and majority of Republican voters who doubt the evolutionary narrative about human origins (though some percentage of those doubters, it should be said, probably believe in an older-than-10,000-years Earth) or look like an anti-science rube. His answer attempts to avoid doing either: Rubio tries to be simultaneously deferential to the authority of scientists, the authority of scripture, and the authority of parents to teach their kids as they see fit. The result is a something of a muddle, but that’s hardly unusual coming from a risk-averse politician, and especially a politician facing a questioner who’s clearly deploying a “conservatives vs. science” framework that’s itself flawed and partisan and incomplete in various ways.

However: The fact that the “conservatives vs. science” framework is frequently unfair doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist, or that Republican politicians should just get a free pass for tiptoeing around it. No matter how you spin it, Rubio’s bets-hedging non-answer isn’t exactly a great indicator about the state of the party he might aspire to lead. Read more…

Republicans in a Changing Country

We’ve had about a week’s worth of recriminations and arguments about where the Republican Party goes from here, and the one theme uniting all of them is this: Whatever a given writer believed before the election correlates marvelously with their favored explanation for why Mitt Romney went down to defeat. If you were happy with the ideological situation on the right, you’ve probably either emphasized the practical deficiencies of the Romney campaign (his weaknesses as a candidate, his flawed turnout operation, his pollster’s rose-colored glasses), or else looked for a supposed silver bullet like immigration reform to solve the Republican Party’s demographic issues without touching the rest of the party platform. If you’re socially conservative and populist but skeptical of Wall Street and big business, then you’ve probably argued the party’s biggest mistake was to nominate a plutocrat and run a campaign tilted too far toward economic individualism and the interests of the rich. If you’re fiscally conservative but libertarian on social issues, then you’ve probably made the case that Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock and anti-immigrant yahoos took the focus off the economy, and that cultural conservatives need to pipe down and let the party modernize on gay rights, immigration and abortion. If you’re David Frum, who has been arguing that the party needs to be more middle class friendly and more socially liberal, then you’ve been claiming vindication on both counts.

My own Sunday column on the post-Romney G.O.P. belonged squarely to this “I told you so, you fools!” genre. I’ve believed since the mid-2000s that the Republican Party lacks a domestic policy agenda suited to the present era’s challenges, and so it’s not surprising that I would see a clear-as-glass connection between this hole in the party’s message and Romney’s underperformance with the middle income Americans whose votes put George W. Bush in the White House. At the same time, I’m pro-life, skeptical of the financial sector’s influence, and doubtful about the wisdom of comprehensive immigration reform, so it’s not surprising that I would find the libertarian/Wall Street Journal attempts to blame the Republican Party’s problems exclusively on cultural conservatives to be deeply unconvincing. I think I’m right on all of these counts, obviously — about the policy, the politics, and the way they intertwine. But of course I would have continued to believe in my own essential correctness if Romney had eked out a narrow victory instead.

So in the spirit of breaking out of the “I told you so” box, let me offer two places where I think the post-Romney G.O.P. could improve its position by changing in ways that don’t necessarily dovetail with my own preconceptions and beliefs. Read more…

The Romney Candidacy in Retrospect

In one of my last pre-election posts, I remarked that the closeness of the election and Mitt Romney’s impressive final month of campaigning meant that he would probably enjoy more respect in defeat than is usual for losing presidential candidates. A week later, that prediction looks more than a little premature, mostly because I thought the final outcome would be closer than it was (closer to 50-49 than the ’04-esque 51-48 it looks like we’ll end up with), and I didn’t realize how completely, wildly off the mark the Romney’s campaign’s theory of the electorate (a theory that I myself found relatively persuasive, I should note) would turn out to be. Right now, between his pollsters’ overconfidence and his consultants’ failure to deliver an effective turnout operation, the epitaph for Romney’s campaign looks more cruel than I anticipated: To borrow from Slate’s John Dickerson, he’ll be remembered as the numbers guy whose numbers were all wrong.

This is all grist for the longtime Romney skeptic Jonathan Last’s obituary, which includes the following question for anyone who argued that Romney was the most electable candidate available:

… let me just pose you this hypothetical:

It’s December 2011 and I come back to you in a time machine from the future. I won’t tell you whether or not he wins, but I will tell you that if Mitt Romney is the nominee in 2012, he will get more than 2 million fewer votes than John McCain did in 2008. Then I leave it up to you: You can go with Romney and hope that’s good enough, or you can pick whoever’s behind Door #2–Perry, Santorum, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Huntsman, whoever. We can’t prove counterfactual history, but I suspect most people would have rolled the dice with Door #2 on the theory of how much worse could it get?

I think Pawlenty and Huntsman are different cases from Santorum, Gingrich and Perry. Read more…

Prediction Time: Obama Survives

As of this writing, my colleague Nate Silver’s election forecast has President Obama’s odds of re-election at 86 percent. The details of his famous forecasting method may be proprietary, but the argument, at this point, is straightforward: The President leads Mitt Romney by a small but solid margin in the state-level polling; that lead has been robust for weeks; state polling has historically been somewhat more accurate and currently provides a richer data set than the national polls where Romney’s numbers are slightly better; and the tight national polling could be consistent with an Obama electoral college win in any case. To pull the election out, Romney needs to win several states where the polls show him basically tied with the president (or even slightly behind, in some of the latest Virginia polling) and then win a state or two from a list (Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, longer shots like Pennsylvania) where the polling has never really shown him doing anything but trailing. This is possible but unlikely; it has grown more unlikely with every passing day; and now “time is up” and Obama’s victory is nearly certain.

This is a compelling way of looking at the election, but as my previous comments on the polls have suggested, I find some of the counter-arguments from commentators more bullish on Romney to be compelling as well. Read more…

Let Us Now Praise Mitt Romney

Later today, I will publish my prediction for tomorrow’s outcome — electoral, popular, the whole shebang — and unless something dramatic changes in the next few hours I’ll be prophesying an excruciatingly narrow Obama win. But before I explain why I think he’s going to just barely lose this election, let me say a few words in praise of Willard Mitt Romney, candidate for president of the United States.

I am a longtime Romney critic. Like many conservatives during the last, exhausted years of Bush’s presidency, I thought he seemed like an attractive figure from a distance, but then like almost everybody I hated the serial phoniness of his 2008 presidential campaign and looked forward to the sequel with a mix of weariness and dread. I didn’t have much of anything nice to say about him in the run-up to the G.O.P. primary season: I wrote columns touting Mitch Daniels’s stillborn candidacy, lamenting Mike Huckabee’s decision to forgo a run, and suggesting that Chris Christie might make a late leap into the race. Once the field was set, I was a sometimes conventional, sometimes lonely voice arguing for Romney’s inevitability, but that was prognostication rather than partisanship, and the twists and turns of the primary season mostly tended to remind me of his myriad flaws as a candidate. For a Republican Party that needed to somehow channel Tea Party zeal into a credible pitch to middle and working class voters skeptical of the party’s economic record, Romney had precisely the wrong profile: His moderate record meant that he had less room to maneuver ideologically than a more consistent conservative might have enjoyed; his temperament and instincts and worldview made him a poor champion for the kind of free market populism that might have bridged the gap between the Tea Party and the center; and his private equity background made him a living, breathing embodiment of everything that Rust Belt swing voters hate about “creative destruction.”

This was my judgment during the primaries, and the summertime campaign left me feeling vindicated. Romney’s strategy seemed to be all caution and zero creativity: He would campaign as the most generic sort of Republican, play for a narrow 51 percent referendum-on-the-economy win, and claim the presidency more or less by default. Given his weaknesses as a candidate — the base’s doubts, blue-collar voters’ suspicions — you could understand the theory, and see the course he hoped to chart. But it left him with little room for error, and August and September were both cruel months: The Ryan pick was bold but politically puzzling; the G.O.P. convention was a play-it-safe nothingburger, the combination of the White House’s anti-Bain attacks and Bill Clinton’s barnburner in Charlotte left Romney exposed — and then his “47 percent” disaster delivered a (self-inflicted) uppercut to the head. At that point, the Romney epitaph seemed to write itself: The wrong man in the wrong year with the wrong campaign strategy, a victim of his own party’s pathologies but also of his poor instincts and self-inflicted wounds.

If Romney loses tomorrow, that obituary would still contain strong elements of truth. But win or lose, the Romney comeback — one great debate performance, two effective follow-ups, and a late-in-the-game transformation, amazingly enough, from the most awkward and uncomfortable-seeming of candidates to a politician that voters actually seem to like — should probably change the way we think about his trajectory as a candidate, both for the Republican nomination and then the presidency. I stand by the criticisms I marshaled across the last year and more, but watching him reach out to almost, almost, grasp the prize this month, it feels like we didn’t give him enough credit for the things that he did right.

Read more…

Who Will Vote?

My Campaign Stops column this week didn’t dive too deeply into the substance of the recent polling controversies, but for anyone confused by the “which polls do you trust?” debate, or why there’s any debate at all, this piece from National Journal’s Reid Wilson on the unusual discrepancy between Democratic and Republican projections is a very useful read:

This year, there’s no wave cresting the week before Election Day, meaning Tuesday’s results will reflect the will of a deeply and bitterly divided nation, roughly the same thing we saw in 2004. We’re about to see the new political normal — but after six years of dramatic waves, no one really knows what normal is supposed to look like.

… Republicans and Democrats alike believe the African American vote is unlikely to change between 2008 and 2012. But they differ dramatically on the number of Hispanic voters who will show up at the polls — a key factor in critical battleground states like Colorado and Nevada. … The same argument happens over younger voters. In 2008, 18 percent of the electorate was made up of voters between 18 and 29 years old. That’s higher than the percentage has been in recent presidential years, when the youth vote has made up around 15 or 16 percent. Republicans believe the younger share of the electorate will slide slightly, and that Obama will win fewer of those voters anyway.

The manifestation of these disagreements is evident in polling weights. Most Republican pollsters are using something close to a 2008 turnout model, with the same percentage of white, black and Hispanic voters as the electorate that first elected Obama. Most Democratic pollsters are a little more bullish on minority turnout, which helps explain some of the difference between the two sides.

As Wilson goes on to note, many of the media polls seem to adopt roughly the same assumptions as the Democratic pollsters. This goes a long way toward explaining why so many state polls, in particular, show persistent advantages in Democratic party identification: The pollsters aren’t weighting by party ID, but they are making various demographic assumptions about which groups will vote and in what kind of numbers, which are leading them to produce samples showing a voting population that includes more Democrats than the electorate that many Republican strategists expect. A national poll like Gallup, on the other hand, seems to be using something closer to the model assumed by Republican pollsters (e.g., similar to 2008 but with lower voter enthusiasm, and no Hispanic uptick), which is why it’s not surprising that Gallup has been predicting a more Republican electorate and (pending their post-hurricane return to polling) a likely Romney popular vote win.

Some partisan groups aside, pollsters have every incentive to get things right, and the fact that there are more polls in the field predicting the kind of turnout Democrats want is good evidence that such turnout might well be forthcoming. But it isn’t dispositive evidence. Read more…

If Romney Wins

For those of us with a Twitter-enabled polling addiction and a bad crosstab habit, it’s almost become possible to lose sight of the fact that there’s more at stake in this election than whether state pollsters are more reliable than national ones, or whether Gallup’s likely-voter screen is an outlier or spot-on, or which party’s demographic projections makes more sense. Maybe that explains why this Politico story on the Romney transition effort seemed to come and go last week with hardly any comment. Obviously the various on-background quotes need to be taken with a grain of salt (not least because the most important players in Romney’s inner circle are still absorbed with the campaign), but this seemed like a striking passage:

One of the biggest worries for a Romney administration, according to the aides, will be keeping conservative lawmakers happy when the most urgent task, dealing with the nation’s fiscal emergency, is going to immediately alienate the loud, powerful wing of House Republicans that is resistant to raising revenues, even though their leaders recognize it is a mathematical necessity.

That would be the most urgent task for a Vice President Paul Ryan, who has credibility with the tea party wing of House Republicans from his stint as a reformist House Budget Committee chairman.

“We’re going to come in and need to be able to do a lot of things that aren’t easy to do,” the official said. “Ryan is going to have to help keep the conservatives at bay and on the field. Some of them are going to expect us to come in and do a lot of things that we aren’t going to be able to do.”

One of those things, the piece reports, is “Romney’s repeated promise to ‘repeal Obamacare’” — which is “sure to be curtailed, even with a Republican Senate, his advisers admit.” Now this is semi-contradicted later in the same piece, when we get a discussion of how Romney plans to “try to use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to rewrite the Tax Code and dump much of the Affordable Care Act.” So again, take it all with a grain of salt. But the thrust of the piece comports with what I’ve heard from various (and to be clear, non-inner circle) people doing work for the transition, and it leaves two strong impressions overall. First, that Romney sees himself as having much more room to maneuver than the liberal narrative about his inevitable captivity to his base (and his own more implausible promises) would suggest. Second, that no matter which party holds the Senate, but especially if the Democrats do, the policy agenda in a Romney presidency — both its shape, and his ability to push it through — will hinge in large part on what kind of cooperation he gets from the more centrist portions of the Democratic Senate caucus.

Here a great deal depends on whether you take 2001 or 2005 as the model for how Senate Democrats might behave. Read more…