BAD FRAMING. Congressional GOP leaders met with some bloggers yesterday to lay out their planned strategy to fight the Democrats' budget resolution this year. The plan, predictably, is to call the Dems' proposal* to let most of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011 "the biggest tax increase in American history."
Though this was obviously before a sympathetic crowd, I think House minority leader John Boehner could stand to tighten his game a bit before entering the real fight: "Either they can cut entitlements, which they're not going to, or they can raise taxes," he told the bloggers. "And they are going to raise taxes." Hmm. You don't have to have Schmittian levels of confidence in a new era of politically viable tax-raising to think that explicitly casting the budget fight this way -- as a zero-sum fight between funding for popular entitlements and high-end tax cuts -- is a bit unwise. Certainly Republicans, when they were in the majority, knew that rendering such conflicts explicit was a no-no. That's why, each year that they passed budget reconciliation bills, they'd deliberately break them into two separate measures -- one that was only tax cuts, the other only spending -- and vote on them at different times during the year, to obscure as much as possible the actual spending consequences of endless tax cutting. Boehner seems to have forgotten that -- in addition to forgetting that you never want to explicitly refer to entitlements when you're discussing cuts in spending, and instead pretend that cutting things like "waste" and those dreaded appropriations earmarks would more than cover the cost of permanent gigantic tax cuts for the rich.
UPDATE: *See Gregory's comment for a useful correction.
--Sam Rosenfeld
