As I am writing this I have to admit that I feel slightly confused. We are still in an economic downturn, and because of that people are unhappy, which means that they have once again voted in a group of people whose policy choices got us here in the first place. But that is not so surprising. If you only have two choices it’s easy to choose the other just because you are unhappy. There aren’t any other alternatives. Well apathy, maybe, but that does not make anybody happy either.
No, my confusion stems from an even simpler situation. There is a federal office called the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that is non-partisan and really only crunches numbers and scenarios to see what the effect is of different political decisions. They were instrumental in getting the health care bill balanced last year, although many of the people in congress chose not to listen to all the data. And this is happening again.
The CBO has come out with a report saying that the most effective thing Congress can do right now to stimulate the economy is to make sure that unemployed people get unemployment benefits. The reason is simple. They live on a tight budget, and any money coming in is spent, which in turn turns the wheels of businesses small and large. This in turn has the effect of improving the economy so that these companies need to hire people, lowering unemployment and increasing spending capital. The CBO has also found that the least effective thing that Congress can do is to reduce income tax. Also not entirely hard to understand, since it would leave people who already earn an (un)reasonable amount of money with slightly more money. Money they will be more likely to save, since the economy is bad.
Are you with me so far? Now comes the conundrum. Why is it that everybody in the GOP says that the most important thing is to make sure that the top 10% earners get to keep their tax cuts. Tax cuts that have had their income increase with 10% year during the 2000s, while the rest have not had any net gain at all. Keeping these tax cuts is so important that they would rather have the economy continue to flag and keep the deficit, since they are unwilling to even consider paying for it. Unemployment benefits on the other hand, they need to be paid for, if they are even considering them at all.
Now I ask the follow-up question. Who benefits from this? Well, as we know, it’s the top 10% earners in the country. That means that if all of them vote Republican, they would constitute about 20% of the GOP vote, since overall it’s fairly even between the parties. Even if we assume that they have 100% voting record (Meg Whitman proves that it’s not the case), as opposed to the 50% average that you might get in a general election means that they can be maybe 40% of the republican voters.
Why does the GOP in Congress want to shaft 60% of the people who elected them? And why do that 60% constituency continue to vote for them? If what they did was because it was the best thing to do for the country I could understand it. But it isn’t. And I don’t. I wish somebody could explain.
