What's at Stake in the Pro-Family Tax Debate
Recently on Twitter I suggested that the real culture war was over whether the government was against something unless it was for it. That formulation is deliberately provocative, but we've seen the underlying dynamic time and again, as members of various affinity and identity groups have insisted that the absence of official recognition or favor by the government is tantamount to nothing less than official disfavor. Usually, this logic is to be found on the left. Occasionally, it appears on the right -- particularly, nowadays, when it comes to what Ross Douthat calls the "pro-family tax agenda" of people like himself, Ramesh Ponnuru, and -- yes, Rick Santorum.
I'm pained and troubled by that agenda, but not quite in the way Ross supposes in his spirited rebuke to my recent column on the matter. I asked for it, in a way, by setting out the following deliberate provocation, but let's revisit and work through the argument:
GOP strategists and analysts are persuaded that defeating Barack Obama and securing a durable majority requires “winning the working class” — an impossible task, they say, in lieu of outright redistributive subsidies, packaged and sold as moral imperatives in an age of decay.
Does America deserve a working class — or a middle class — if it is dependent for its existence on the federal government? Few wish to ask, and fewer wish to answer.
Ross presumes that the rhetorical flourish means I take the current Republican tax policy to lock people into a state of existential dependence:
Families who either benefited from an expanded personal deduction for children or applied an expanded tax credit against their income and payroll taxes would no more be “dependent for [their] existence on the federal government” than an investor who benefited from the differential treatment that the tax code gives to income from capital gains, or a business that benefited from a reduction in the corporate tax rate, or an heir who benefited from the abolition of the estate tax.
Let me stipulate this now as I assumed it then. Rather than trying to somehow frame these kinds of benefits as deep servitude today, I hoped to raise the specter that, at the level of national politics as it's currently practiced, the logic underlying such "differential treatment" is extraordinarily difficult to draw lines around or cabin off. I hoped to caution that its inherent thrust, especially given current socioeconomic trends, is toward an ever-increasing degree of dependency without any clear demarcation point at which we ought to stop short.
Our debate should be revolving around these concerns -- not whether America would be better off (as it would) with bigger, stronger families. How significantly does the use of tax policy to monetize and extend special favor to specific groups contribute to the current popular view that if one's group is not being favored in this way then the people in charge in Washington are fighting a war on one's group? Even Ross, judicious as he is, comes close to adopting that view.
Meanwhile, without addressing the question of wage subsidies, he denies that those arguing for "a more family-friendly tax code" seek “outright redistributive subsidies,” claiming instead that theirs is "an argument for cutting taxes on a form of investment in this country’s future that standard tax-cutting proposals tend to leave overtaxed." I admit that I recoil whenever I hear about investing in America's future -- not because I don't like the idea of a better future, but because that rhetorical turn of phrase demonstrably serves as the master narrative and justification for any and all federal plans and projects, however minute or grandiose.
Yet Ross puts his preferred tax policy in those terms because he really believes that the alternative is something approaching ruin -- for the country and the GOP. In other words, no alternative:
A tax cut for families, then, doesn’t just benefit the minority of Americans who happen to be raising children at any given time. Because every adult begins life as a child, it benefits almost every American born and raised after the tax cut goes into effect. In the most literal sense, it’s a tax cut on future generations, designed to supply a modest counterweight to the existing tax-and-entitlement system’s persistent bias against childrearing.
Why not reform that system, instead of seeking ever-greater and ever-more-prolonged counterweights? However modest, such measures strongly reinforce the broader logic that expands government influence over everyday life and exacerbates the polarized view of national politics that divides us all into noble champions or implacable foes of our many identity groups. The implication of Ross's argument is that the bias in the existing tax-and-entitlement system is embedded too deeply to remove anytime soon, perhaps because the existing system is itself too cumbersome and deeply rooted for Republicans to do much to change. The present is so unsalvagable, it appears, that it will fail (and Republicans will fail to win durable majorities) unless Republicans travel into the future, in some not-quite-literal sense, to give preferential tax treatment to Americans who have not even been born yet.
Is this not a sign of a fundamentally dysfunctional system of governance? On the other hand, Ross is surely right to imply that there just isn't broad-based national support for a massive overhaul of the tax-and-entitlement beast. Ross modestly claims he's one of "a few eccentrics" supporting Santorum-style tax policy, but it seems to me that many, many Bush-era Republicans are convinced that "counterweights" are the only policy strategy available that can mitigate the propensity of the current system to lead people into increasing dependence and away from the GOP. Instead of an act of sunny optimism, Santorumesque tax policy is revealed as a more or less desperate rear-guard action, a last-ditch effort to help working-class (and, increasingly, middle-class) Americans sustain the kinds of family structures that tend to produce flourishing individuals (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Republican voters).
Is America really doomed unless Republicans journey into the future to save the bedrock of the social order? If so, we should have a conversation about that. Because there are two responses to such a dire situation. The first is to ensure that the GOP complete the mission at all costs. The second is to ensure that there isn't some way to alter the underlying situation. Sometimes we humans refuse to accept a seemingly hopeless situation because its absurdity offends our deepest sense of what it means to be human. The rejection of the absurdity of official policy seems to me to be at the heart of the Tea Party movement, for instance...
But that's a pretty metaphysical note to go out on. So let me reiterate the central claim of my column, which I think remains a problem for Ross -- even if we both agree, as we do, that the current system is pushing people too strongly away from flourishing families and into individual dependence:
the Bush years proved beyond question how difficult it is to cabin off “good” interventions in the minute details of our moral lives from “bad” interventions in our finances, our health care, our education, and other similarly sweeping areas.
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May '11
Re: What's at Stake in the Pro-Family Tax Debate
Although I believe that the two parent family is the foundation of our civilization, I've become convinced that the government shouldn't be in the business of subsidizing one model over another. It used to be that peer pressure within society would police morals; the concept of shame seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. These days people want to use the government and the tax code to regulate all our behavior. This is a dangerous way to run a sociey and the erosion in our culture proves it.
May '10
Re: What's at Stake in the Pro-Family Tax Debate
Europe has a much flatter tax code than us -- that is, they tax young people at a higher rate than we do. And they're in a demographic death spiral.