On Second Thought: Beware the dead center

The No Labels Party thinks the country needs a centrist option for the 2024 presidential contest — maybe something like a West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin/former Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan unity ticket. But do the two big parties really have that much trouble uniting when it counts?

The recent debt ceiling drama answers the question. Whatever the partisan uproar might be about who gets to say what on Twitter and what books kids get to read in school (stuff Congress and the White House is going to leave it up to the courts and state legislatures to decide anyway), when it comes to the big issue — how to divvy up the national wealth — the parties already know how to unify. That's the reason leaders from both parties are now celebrating victory in the debt ceiling war. The only question: Is the “center” Republican and Democratic leaders have just marked for us actually the sweet spot for running a government for the people?

The agreement a Democratic president and Republican speaker of the House gave us re calibrates the engine of government to make it a little easier for those who have money to keep it, and for those who don't to go on wanting. Some millions of people who haven't had to worry about federal student loan payments since pandemic relief action took effect three years ago get to start worrying again this summer. New work requirements will bump some tens of thousands off food stamps (and the paperwork that comes with new rules will defeat others). Meanwhile, the IRS funding cut means fewer auditors to plague high-income earners who know how to play the tax code. And, while programs for our health and safety get less, the Pentagon actually ends up with more money, a good deal for investors.

Of course, some adjustment might seem timely. The country is only a few months past a brief period of Democratic rule in both congressional domains, as well as in the White House. Maybe welfare/entitlement happy Democrats were spending us into the poorhouse on schemes to fix roads, slow the planet's rising fever, keep some of the poisons out of the water, and the like. When that happens, it's time for Republicans to remind their colleagues of the national debt. But there are reasons to doubt that partisan reading.

First, the modest increase in domestic spending Democrats managed with their infrastructure legislation isn't in the same budget busting league as the big jump in military spending both parties agreed to last year, this year and every year because Democrats and Republicans in Congress always agree the military industrial congressional complex needs more.

Besides, the debt ceiling agreement isn't actually about the national debt. If the idea was to do something about the growing debt, the solution was simple: raise taxes on the wealthy (whose share of the pie rose sharply during the pandemic years) to pay down debt. Of course, Republicans can't be expected to contemplate taxing the rich, but in the moment of crisis, most Democrats didn't make much noise about that solution either. Only a few of the usual congressional troublemakers on the left pushed notions like rolling back some of the 2017 corporate tax breaks or a wealth tax.

Republican leaders are sometimes clear about why it has to be this way: when the rich (aka “job creators”) get even more money, they invest which is good for everyone; other people just blow any extra on beer or retirement.

Nominally, Democrats look askance at this austerity always way of doing business, but the proof is in the policy. Remember how the country escaped a rail service disaster a few months ago? Railroad owners didn't want to waste their money on railroaders lying around on sick days; railroaders said they'd strike rather than swallow a contract with no sick days. Heeding advice from the railroad owners and ignoring union objections, the Democratic president called on Congress to order railroaders to keep on working, whether they liked the owners contract or not. With a few dissenters, from left and right, congressional Republicans joined Democrats to unite with the president and the owners in telling the railroaders to stop whining about getting sick, and keep on working.

Occasionally the problem demands a different fix. That plan remains a Democratic/ Republican unity fix. During the pandemic when everyone was feeling poorly, you got a check from the Trump administration and, a little later, one from the Biden government.

But generally, what's needed to keep the country on track, according to Democratic/Republican leadership, is more money for people who already have a lot, and not too much for everybody else. Remember 15 years ago when speculative bankers cost a lot of Americans homes and retirement dreams? Under the leadership of a Democratic president, Congress solved the problem by loaning the bankers a lot of money. Even when the implicit bipartisan solution is to do nothing, the general — more for those who have, less for the rest — approach is likely to be the same. For over a year now, as inflation outpaced pension payments and wages, only a few congressional mavericks have suggested anything like an excess profits tax to discourage price gouging. Instead, leaders of both parties have been happy to let the Federal Reserve follow a plan to beat inflation by putting an end to full employment and tamping down wages.

If recent examples seem to give Democrats too much credit, over the long term, Republicans have done more than their share. Over the past half century, Republicans have taken the lead in tax reform initiatives to assure that people with more money keep more.

Ever since Reagan was president, Democrats or Republicans on top,whenever something went wrong American leaders have fiddled with the controls to make sure the job creators (aka the rich) have enough money. It's worked, sort of: American GDP — gross domestic product — keeps chugging along; American worker productivity has soared over that half century, though GDP has only chugged along (turns out billionaires are as ready to spend a tax break on jobs in China as in Detroit). On the other hand, inequality has soared, too, as more and more of that money got stuck at the top while wages stayed flat. Maybe it is time to get somebody who is neither Democrat nor Republican to have a look at the economic engine, but not somebody from the entrenched center; it's Democratic/Republican unity that got us here.

——

Will Rawn of Havre is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor