Seasoned Democrats try and keep from drowning in a constant deluge of what-ifs, half truths, falsities, and fear as many from the Progressive bloc clutch to them, risking taking the new House majority down before they even begin.
HOOOOOOOOO BOY. I just read a recent piece by Eric Levitz in New York Magazine and funny enough I was wondering how long it would be before Pay-Go came up as the latest cudgel against the idea of Pelosi's Speakership. Where to even begin unpacking this?
We shouldn't raise middle class taxes a single iota. That's a great thing. We should say that the GOP was right to cut middle class taxes (even if they weren't nearly aggressive enough) but that they were reckless in giving the top 1% so much free money, especially given that it hasn't created jobs or boosted GDP growth or created an increase in wages. So rhetorically, saying "we also won't raise taxes ON THE MIDDLE CLASS" is a very critical thing, especially given how much the GOP loves to paint liberals as crazy tax-and-spend socialists. Point the second, the author - who's presenting as objective analysis what is in fact wanton partisanship - just dismisses the idea of increasing payroll taxes because #reasons, I guess. Nothing in the actual rule change says that it will apply to payroll taxes. He's just intuiting that because................he is.
To socialists, Pay-Go is Corporate Neoliberal Shill Sellout whatever-the-f*ck. But also: socialism hasn't been proven as a viable economic model yet, so here we are. The debt is too high. The debt should come down.
Because it makes his overly partisan case stronger. Which leads to: Point the third, I don't care how many people ran on Medicare-for-All and won, we are not going to M4A anytime in the next 10 years. It's a cool bumper sticker, but once you unpack what it entails it will DIE in 65% of the country that isn't NY/CA/etc. We should use Medicare-for-All as a cudgel to get a smarter piece of legislation - a public option - passed. A public option wouldn't demonstrably raise tax rates but it would lower private insurance rates (Center for American Progress has a great piece on what they're calling Medicare Extra).
Point the Fourth, Modern Money Theory or whatever fancy term he has for it is fucking dumb. I'm ALL FOR deficit financing our country (it worked for Amazon), but our debt is shockingly, staggeringly, unconscionably high. Like it or not our pension funds are tied up in the stock market doing well and deficit spending until the sun burns out isn't the way to lead to global economic success and long-term security. China is already reducing the amount of US debt they're willing to buy and there aren't a lot of countries out there with more use for it than China. All of which addresses:
Point the Fifth, Pay-Go is a good idea. Pay-As-You-Go is what Pelosi had in place the last time she was Speaker. Basically every new spending dollar has to be offset by increased revenue. That's why the ACA had the medical device tax. It's a way of being fiscally responsible instead of running up the national debt to even more staggering heights than it's already at. To socialists, Pay-Go is Corporate Neoliberal Shill Sellout whatever-the-f*ck. But also: socialism hasn't been proven as a viable economic model yet, so here we are. The debt is too high. The debt should come down. We should pay for our new spending programs. The fact that the GOP doesn't pay for shit doesn't mean we shouldn't either. Someone in this country has to be fiscally responsible. You know when the GOP is like "if Democrats were running things we'd be GREECE by now" ? Well, without Pay-Go, we're Greece. At least, we're hurtling towards Greece status. And you know who bailed out Greece? We did. Unless you want to start pricing the oil in Alaska to sell off to China, WE NEED PAY-GO. And of course, at the very last possible second, the author gives up the game: he believes that Medicare-for-All is the single only priority for Democrats that matters to anyone who voted for them and that unless Pelosi upends 1/6 of the US economy overnight via M4A with literally zero dollars to offset the trillions of dollars it will cost, she has betrayed the True Liberals who put her in power.
This is a piece worthy of Huffington Post or Splinter News or Jacobin. The fact that it's in NY Mag is distressing. But I guess we're setting up the goalposts now for why Nancy Pelosi will be the evil menace of Puritanical Liberalism for the 87th time since she was elected.
-Chris Baugh