Kevin D. Williamson of National Review rarely offers Republican congressional leaders much praise. This week he makes an exception for House Speaker John Boehner.
Speaker Boehner does not excite many budget hawks, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of the Republican leadership in toto. But give him this: His insistence that serious entitlement reform be included in any grand bargain is exactly the right position. Entitlement deficits may not be the largest driver of our overall deficits right at this moment, but they are the biggest long-term threat to our national fiscal solvency. As I wrote early about Gov. Rick Perry’s fiscal plan: If you can get the entitlements right, you deserve a medal. What we do about entitlement spending will determine whether we squeak by or plow straight into Fiscal Armageddon.
The Democrats desperately want a tax increase — and not just because they want to spend the money. (Though, boy, do they ever want to spend the money.) Tax increases are for the Democrats what closing down the National Endowment for the Arts is to Republicans: a visceral cultural issue. The difference, of course, is that Democrats seriously intend to raise taxes. (If Republicans were going to close down the NEA, they would have done it by now.) That’s a real problem for Democrats and for the country. Because taxes are a culture-war issue for the Democrats, they keep proposing the wrong kind of tax increases, with the wrong kind of structure and the wrong goals. I do not think it is likely that Republicans are just going to roll over for a significant increase in the tax rates for upper-income Americans, in the tax rates for investment income, or other similar rate increases. Republicans probably can (and, in my view, probably should) support a deal that trades the elimination of exemptions and exclusions (both for individual taxpayers and for businesses) for lower rates. If the Democrats were smart, they would accept that deal, structured in a way that produces a net tax increase. Instead, they’re giving every indication that they intend to make notional tax rates on high earners their hill to die on.
Boehner may not pull it off, but he is setting the stage for a double win: real entitlement reform plus some useful tax-code reform. He may not give conservatives the kind of thrill that Newt Gingrich’s bold talk used to give us, but the odds are pretty good that we’re going to get the right outcome here — not the best imaginable outcome, but the best outcome out of the plausible outcomes before us.
