On Tuesday morning, there were reports that the White House’s negotiators and John Boehner’s staff were talking—or at least muttering—to each other about the fiscal cliff, which the country will hit in twenty days. One should hope so. There are also reports, already, of schools that serve military children firing teachers and eliminating A.P. classes because going off the cliff would mean that they couldn’t afford to keep them—to list just one small example alongside the larger uproar about market uncertainty and financial turmoil that would likely ensue. Going over the fiscal cliff means that taxes go up for everybody, including the poor, and families that rely on the child and earned-income tax credits; it also means sequestration: automatic cuts of a hundred and ten billion dollars from discretionary spending. This is supposed to be divided between domestic programs and defense/national security—although, as the situation of soldiers’ children indicates, the line can be blurry.
So why is it so hard to focus—in a non-dawdling way—on the fiscal cliff? It has an unpleasantness to it that goes beyond the standard tedium of budget debates. We’ve all been inveigled in a distinctly Republican psychodrama that is not even particularly fascinating, unless one genuinely feels a pang at John Boehner’s sense of lèse-majesté (or, worse, Eric Cantor’s) or that some age of chivalry will be over if Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge has to be abandoned. Polls show that Americans would blame the Republicans if talks fail, and they’d be right to. Just watching the cliff-talk closely demands an extraordinarily high level of tolerance for pouting and counter-pouting on the part of the G.O.P. It’s not the budget math that kills one’s will when it comes to buying into this debate: it’s the huffiness.
John Boehner and his colleagues seem to want a great deal of credit for saying, in response to the President’s last budget proposal, that they could see closing loopholes and ending or capping deductions in such a way as to raise eight hundred billion dollars in tax revenues over the next decade—just so long as no tax rates are involved. There are three problems with that. First, how to do so mathematically is a bit of a mystery. There are apparently ways to sort of make it work, but it involves wiping out charitable deductions and credits for things like retirement—the very things that are meant to compensate for the inadequacy of our social-safety net. Second, Obama, very reasonably, says that he won’t do a deal unless it involves raising taxes on the top two per cent of households—and the country supports him. (See John Cassidy for more on that.) Third, getting to the point where leading Republicans could even talk about revenue in any form involved throes of agony on the part of the G.O.P.—and the process is not complete. It is hard to negotiate with a party that is in the middle of an internal philosophical struggle, especially when it is full of sourness about its recent election loss.
There are Republicans, like Tom Coburn or Haley Barbour, who are talking, in a grudging way, about agreeing to raise rates. Then there is Senator Lindsey Graham, on Fox News on Monday: “Raising rates is sort of a partisan political trophy for Obama. I don’t want to go down that road.” He added, “You just got reëlected. How about doing something big that is not liberal? … How about manning up here, Mr. President, and use your mandate to bring this country together to stop us from becoming Greece?” (Democratic politicians who win elections on platforms that are liberal apparently “man up” by doing things that aren’t liberal.) The arguments against rate-raising, as opposed to loophole closing, can be wild: rich people are smart, and would just hide more money; a hundred billion dollars here or there wouldn’t close the deficit—an argument that Republicans never seem to apply to much smaller amounts allocated for, say, education or cultural programs. Also, as the Times noted, a good number of individual congressmen feel that the only people they have to answer to care less about the cliff than about anti-tax purity.
The negotiations depend on the congressional Republicans either getting to the point of acceptance—and consensus—on tax rates, or moving away from their internal “majority of the majority” rule. The idea there is that the House leadership would not let anything come up to a vote unless a majority of Republican congressmen agree, taking away the possibility of peeling away whatever moderates there still are in the caucus. That is not helpful.
And so disaster may be at hand, but no one seems invigorated by the suspense. Commentators keep talking about a game of chicken, but it doesn’t feel like anyone pointing stolen cars toward the abyss, with Natalie Wood about to give the signal to start. It’s more like the Republican Party has been inhabited by a group of sullen middle-schoolers throwing pebbles off the ledge, and at each other, while the rest of us have to watch—cheated out of a post-election interlude of not being subjected to too much nonsense.
Illustration by Tim Lahan.