From Steve Benen: the Republicans’ “serious” offer, in one chart.

From Steve Benen: the Republicans’ “serious” offer, in one chart.

Confused about what exactly the GOP’s latest fiscal offer includes? Wondering whether it might not be some sort of conservative-Democratic proposal from Erskine Bowles, in spite of not being Simpson-Bowles, nor proposed by Bowles, nor endorsed by Bowles? Steve Benen has come to our aid:

Steve Benen-Chart of Republicans' fiscal offer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That pretty much does it. The one thing I disagree with Steve on is his assertion that the hard Right is only pretending to dislike the offer. I think its feeling of betrayal at Boehner’s vague promise to close unspecified loopholes and use the revenue to reduce the deficit is sincere—absurd, but sincere. Conservative activists really believe that raising taxes is evil, full stop, and that any Republican proposal to do so, however nebulous or presumptively regressive, counts as a sellout. Or rather: while some top conservative strategists may be saying this strategically to gain leverage, if the rank-and-file takes the propaganda to be the real conservative position, it starts to become such.

Author: Andrew Sabl

Andrew Sabl, a political theorist, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, both from Princeton University Press. His research interests include political ethics, liberal and democratic theory, toleration, the work of David Hume, and the realist school of contemporary political thought. He is currently finishing a book for Harvard University Press titled The Uses of Hypocrisy: An Essay on Toleration. He divides his time between Toronto and Brooklyn.

4 thoughts on “From Steve Benen: the Republicans’ “serious” offer, in one chart.”

  1. Andrew,

    Can we please stop referring to Norquist and his latter-day visigoths as conservative activists? These people are not conservatives: they are reactionaries trying to stuff us all back into some sort of nightmare version of Ozzie and Harriet.

    1. I’m a descriptivist. If the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves conservative activists agree with Norquist, that becomes the position that defines conservative activism. If that means that “conservative,” at least in the U.S., ceases to be a respectable label among reasonable people, then there’s no avoiding that. In fact there has been no avoiding that for some time.

      1. I think it would be reasonable to call them “self-styled” conservative activists. The vast majority of spokestwits from the Discovery Institute call themselves scientists, after all.

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