Personal Experience Means Everything: Rob Portman and Gay Rights

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Many outlets including the Huffington Post report this morning that Senator Portman - one of the original authors of DOMA - is changing his stance on gay marriage.  About two years ago, his son came out to him and his wife - and he has spent the last two years reflecting, speaking with clergy, and (presumably) praying about the matter.

More and more Republicans are going to have similar experiences.  It is easy to reject something foreign and distant that you only see on television.  But the issue becomes "real" when it affects those we love: our family, our friends, our neighbors. 

I think Portman's got it right, and it's how I have felt for years.  In Matthew, Jesus tells us that the two highest "commandments" are (1) to "Love the Lord" with all the intensity you can muster and (2) to "Love your neighbor as yourself."  (Matt. 22:36-40).  In Portman's own words:

"The overriding message of love and compassion that I take from the Bible, and certainly the Golden Rule, and the fact that I believe we are all created by our maker, that has all influenced me in terms of my change on this issue." 

Amen.

Dispatching Krugman and his "Crude Keynesianism" too

At Huffington Post, economist Jeffrey Sachs dissects Krugman's recent claims that we don't have a deficit problem and explains why Great Depression-era thinking does not apply to today's world.  Most importantly, Professor Sachs looks long-term and rejects the approach that "spending is spending" and short-term projects (or tax cuts) are as effect as the real thing.  A sample of the must-read below:

I have argued against short-term stimulus packages. Krugman has supported them, and indeed argued that they should have been even larger. I have been against temporary tax cuts and temporary spending programs, believing that instead we need a consistent, planned, decade-long boost in public investments in people, technology, and infrastructure. Such a sustained rise in public investment should have been paid for by ending the Bush-era tax cuts in 2010, or by adopting a comparable boost in revenues. Instead Obama and Congress have now made almost all of those tax cuts permanent, putting us into a deeper fiscal bind.

Yesterday, Krugman responded to my recent op-ed by digging in deeper on the deficit question. He argued yet again that the U.S. can and should incur more debt to pay for a short-term boost in aggregate demand. While he did not lay out a quantified plan (that has been the case from the start, so it's hard to know exactly what Krugman has in mind in a quantitative sense), the CBO has recently estimated that without the recent deficit-reduction actions of the White House and Congress, the public debt would rise to around 87 percent of GDP in a decade. I presume that Krugman would support that trajectory or something like it (he should tell us by now what path of deficits he actually recommends).

Cuccinelli's Pledge Against Pledges

This week, VA gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli - considered a conservative Republican by almost everyone - is taking a stand against Grover Norquist and ATR.  As Politico reports, Cuccinelli wants to tackle tax reform as governor, and ATR's "pledge" may block any such efforts.  Cuccinelli, therefore, is refusing to sign it.  (Side note: for evidence of Cuccinelli's fiscal conservatism, see his writing in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy).

For years, ATR has taken a hard line on its "no new taxes" pledge.  The most recent examples have been its repeated claims that it considers closing a tax loophole to constitute a tax hike.  As many GOPers have come to realize, this interpretation of the ATR pledge blocks any meaningful tax reform.  In any tax reform effort - as opposed to a straight tax cut - there's going to be a reallocation of taxes.  Many people believe that rates should decrease but deductions should be cut so more money would be subject to those lower rates.  Others may think that particular segments of society are not paying their share or that certain activities (like driving, drilling, or living near the ocean) are not bearing their full societal costs.

Any way you slice it, meaningful reform means someone might pay more taxes.  This makes sense: the current tax code was largely written for the 1986 economy.  We had just suffered the oil embargo and an era of "malaise."  No one anticipated the "peace dividend," multiple rounds of free trade talks, the internet, and the rise of mobile computing.  Today's economy is significantly different from that of 1986, and it would make sense that good tax policy might demand a different formula than thirty years ago.

For Cuccinelli, assuming he wins in 2013, he's going to be term-limited.  Could this be the first shot-across-the-bow of a future Senate run?  I can see the messaging now: "I'm a conservative, and I have commonsense conservative principles - not silly pledges - to back it up."