Michael Kinsley on the GOP and Taxes

In Slate today, arch-contrarian Michael Kinsley (who, in an impressive feat of contrariness, is also pillar of the mainstream commentariat) says that GOP candidates offering tax simplification may be "committing political suicide." He rightly points out that Huckabee’s FairTax proposal is far more complicated than the candidate and other FairTax advocates suggest, but he also mistakenly labels the plan as far more regressive than it is. I don’t support the FairTax at all, but it does seek to balance out its regressive nature a little more than Kinsley suggests.

Where Kinsley goes completely — if somewhat predictably — wrong, however, is when talking about the way taxes necessarily interact with spending.

The spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.

That’s clever enough, but it makes almost no sense as policy or strategy.  Republican legislators have obviously not followed through on promises to cut spending, but this is hardly a reason to abandon the project.  Kinsley no doubt favors certain policies (though, with a few exceptions, he’s often coy about spelling out exactly what he likes), and I’m willing to bet that if his party of choice doesn’t follow through on enacting those policies, he doesn’t simply throw in the towel.  A good idea is a good idea, regardless of how willing legislators have been to pursue it.  And spending cuts — not merely reductions in the rate of growth — are very clearly a good idea.