‘Nobody’s turning on me,” antitax activist Grover Norquist insisted Monday, but the evidence is suggesting otherwise: To their credit, Senators Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and several other senior Republicans are walking away from Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which has hamstrung serious budget negotiations in Washington for years. It’s a welcome acknowledgement that opposing any net income tax increases regardless of the circumstances, as Norquist’s pledge requires, renders any serious effort at deficit reduction impossible.
Norquist rolled out his pledge in 1986, when maximum marginal income tax rates of 70 percent were still a recent memory. But today, the maximum rate is 35 percent. Meanwhile, the United States has in the last decade fought two wars without seeking additional funding, and is still recovering from the worst recession in half a century. Reagan-era fiscal policies need not be binding now, as key GOP lawmakers are now explaining. “I care more about my country,” Chambliss declared last week, “than I do about a 20-year-old pledge.”
Comments
The signers should be indicted for subversion on by one.
The Norquist reign of tax terror is finally waning. When a society as complex and massive as America needs to collect revenue to pay down the decades of debt accrued because of ineffective politicians poor decisions, we must now bear the brunt of the consequences of higher taxes.
What doesn't get mentioned enough is the means by which Grover enforces his ideology. He and his gang of thugs go into local primaries and replace recalcitrant Republicans with mere stooges, many of whom are totally unqualified to serve in Congress. They then run these Teapartying fools against the Democrat, and by outspending the opposition with obnoxious attack ads, win the seat. Dirty tricks and skullduggery every step of the way, all of which completely undermines the democratic process, and loads the Congress with brainless ideologues, and toadies to Grover's megalomania. If the FEC had any teeth at all, they would chew him up and spit him out.