This morning Ezra Klein wrote, The Reality of Tax Reform: Less Charity, Smaller Homes, Higher State Taxes. It gets to the heart of politics, but most especially Republican politics. It’s all about vagueness of proposals.

The reason I associate it with Republicans is that their policy prescriptions are generally unpopular. So rather than say “cut popular deductions” they say, “Let’s broaden the tax base.” That sounds great, right? Broaden the tax base! It sounds like getting other people involved in paying taxes. What it means is making you pay more in taxes.

Klein quote Peter Orszag, who notes that 90% of all deductions (or “base broadening,” if you prefer) is in the form of three deductions: home interest, charitable giving, and state and local taxes. The home interest deduction was put in place to encourage home ownership. In general, I’m not in favor of it. Home ownership tends to tie workers down and make them more compliant. In fact, I think this was the main purpose of it; the government doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about who owns property; someone will own it who will pay taxes.

I also don’t think much about the charitable giving tax deduction. I tend to think that people give to charities because they want to. The fact that they get a deduction is just icing on the cake. The state and local taxes deduction, on the other hand, is very important. These taxes tend to be regressive or at least not progressive. Providing a federal tax deduction limits some of the harm that these taxes cause.

The main thing to notice about these tax deductions is how much they would affect the middle class. This gets back to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Mitt Romney’s budget proposal. The problem was that there just weren’t enough upper class deductions to pay for the upper class tax cuts. Of course, Romney knew that. He just didn’t think that anyone else would notice.

And so the Republican Party continues on with their vague plans to “broaden the tax base.” This is because they know that “screw the middle class” would not be very easy to sell. But that’s what it is. If someone will not give you details, it is because it is a bad deal. In this case, it is a bad deal.

Update (30 November 2012 10:23 pm)

I just saw Ezra Klein hosting The Last Word. He noted that people making over $200,000 per year give 20% of the nation’s total charitable giving. This represents about the top 2.5% of income earners. But let’s look at the top 1%, because I have data on them. They earn 24% of the total yearly earnings. They own 40% of all the wealth in the country. My point here is that the rich apparently don’t give to charities at as high a level as their income and wealth would indicate. As usual: fuck the rich. They are a bunch of selfish assholes. Ezra Klein needs to stop pointing out the large absolute value of their giving and put it into perspective.

Richard Barry over at The Reaction writes, How the Republican Party Could Save Itself. In it, he discusses a Time magazine article by Mike Murphy, Can This Party Be Saved? Barry, like most liberals, holds out some hope that we might some day get a reasonable opposition party. And Murphy’s idea does sound good. But I think it is meaningless.

There are two kinds of non-crazy Republicans in America.[1] The first kind is exemplified by David Cay Johnson, who aligns with Republican ideals but doesn’t seem to agree with them on any actual policy and rarely votes for them. Then there are the others. Many of these people seem reasonable, but like David Frum, they still managed to convince themselves that Mitt Romney would make a better president than Barack Obama. Simply: anyone still voting Republican is either evil or just not paying attention.

Murphy tells us there are two competing definitions of conservatism:

The problem here is that he’s just described the Republican and Democratic parties. And this is the problem with “moderate” Republicans: they are always calling for a party that already exists. The fact that they could solve all their problems by switching parties means one of two things. Either they are too partisan to see the truth or they secretly like what the Republicans are doing but want to be more discrete. I’m sure there is some of the former. Thomas Friedman certainly seems to fall in this category, and I don’t think he is even a Republican. But most people fall in the latter category: they just want to talk nice about vile policy.

I’m with Richard Barry: I’d like to see Republicans turn into a more reasonable party. But I have little hope of this. It all comes down to the very definition of conservatism. The movement is bound by the idea that the way things are is the way that things should be. Any change to the status quo would be bad. The same people who once argued that slavery was all part of God’s plan now argue that teenage motherhood, the nobility of the rich, and religious wars are all part of God’s plan.

Contra what all conservatives believe in their souls: we have not reached the end of history. There is so much that we could do to create a more egalitarian world that does a far better job of maximizing happiness. But for all the talk of people like Murphy, they only want progress that keeps things as they are. And it is the oxymoronic quality of this thinking that will stop the Republican Party from ever becoming reasonable.

[1] There are two kinds of people in the world: