Morici: GOP Must 'Create Jobs & Govern Reasonably'

by JASmius



Another Tea Party reality check:

Having won control of Congress, the GOP must now put forward a clear program to create jobs and govern reasonably, lest it give Democrats the upper hand for the 2016 presidential election....

Republicans’ standard prescriptions — tax cuts and repeal ObamaCare — are non-starters.

Tax reductions are not realistic, because the situation in the Middle East and the Chinese and Russian military buildups will require more rather than less defense spending. And the Affordable Care Act — or anything that could reasonably replace it — will prove more costly than was expected when it passed in 2010.

Hardly anyone likes the IRS, and the GOP could gain a lot by championing tax simplification and making federal compliance agents a less ominous force in everyone’s life.

Nixing business tax loopholes, which favor some businesses over others, to lower the 35% top corporate rate can be accomplished.

However, Republicans want reform to lower tax revenues overall, whereas Obama wants to raise more cash to spend on new projects.

Republicans would be smart to offer a revenue neutral package, and challenge Democrats to help eliminate as many special provisions and lower rates as much as possible.

Then it would be up to the president and his allies in congress to sign up or look unreasonable.

Call it using public policy to jockey for political position.  Remember, folks, this is a process, and we can't get where we want to go in one giant leap.  And that requires "playing the political game".

If the above has TPers breaking out in hives, this will make them uncontrollably nauseous:

The GOP cannot repeal the ACA, because it lacks enough votes in the Senate to override a presidential veto. It is impossible to roll back the clock, because the old insurance plans are gone, and many individuals now depend on the ACA’s previsions, no matter how costly those may be.

Which was part of the point, if you'll recall. That is how entitlements programs are entrenched, after all.

Republicans would do well to propose reforms lessening the ACA’s jobs-killing consequences. For example, junking the employer mandate, encouraging more competition among insurance plans to lower premiums, and benchmarking prices charged for medical devices, drugs and hospital procedures to those in European systems with less-costly, insurance-based systems like Germany.

Call it a downpayment on ObamaCare repeal.  And when The One balks, just as with the tax policy proposals above, Democrats' trademark demagoguery can be defused in the run-up to 2016.  Because the process is about regaining the one missing piece - the presidency - without which repealing the UCLA is not possible.  You want that signing ceremony with a smiling President Walker, Speaker Boehner, and Majority Leader McConnell?  This is how you get there.

Mr. Morici doesn't have it all figured out, of course.  The only way to "[replace] the personal income tax with a simple value-added tax" is to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, and that would require a level of political omnipotence that only God Himself possesses.  Enact a VAT, then, and it would be on top of the personal income tax, and that would be stark raving insane.

I know that "governing reasonably" is not what Tea Partiers want.  I know that they will consider that a "RINO sellout".  But, to quote Ronald Reagan, Tea Partiers "know so much that isn't so".  And to quote former Rams and Seahawks coach Chuck Knox, "You play the hand you're dealt".  Because it's the only way to, eventually, run the table.