ABSTRACT
Overall the public attitude toward government and politicians at all levels, particularly in Congress, is highly cynical and suspicious, and this is reflected in the general media coverage about divided government and gridlock, especially on domestic issues like taxes, budgets and entitlement programs. There was no real groundswell of public support for the Republican policies on these issues, however, and in fact their positions on them probably led to their defeat in the 2012 elections. Outside of their conservative core of voters, there is no real enthusiasm for privatizing Medicare and Social Security, cutting back domestic programs or giving the wealthy another tax cut. Nor will the ideological and policy divisions between the parties end in the foreseeable future, although as of now neither has the political power to pass the policies they most desire.
In a Los Angeles Times article from January 27, 2013 concerning the clash between the administration of President Barack Obama and the House Republican leadership of the national debts, taxes, budget priorities and entitlement programs could have been written at virtually any time over the last three years. Ever since the Republicans took over the House in the 2010 elections and they achieved enough votes to filibuster all legislation in the Senate, virtually nothing of substance has been accomplished on any of these issues. In this article, Rep. Paul Ryan (who was Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 election) insisted that Obama was seeking only “political conquest” on all these issues, but the truth is that there has not been such a radical conflict of ideology and policy between the Democrats and Republicans in many decades (Memoli 2013). Ryan and his colleagues have made many similar statements about Obama over the past four years, and did so frequently during the recent elections, but the fundamental reason that there has not been and most likely never will be a ‘grand bargain’ over taxes, the debt and entitlements is that the ideologies and policies of these two parties are so fundamentally different from each other that compromise of the major issues is extremely difficult.
In the debate over policy alternatives, Republicans like Ryan wanted to privatize Medicare and Social Security, turning the former into a voucher program managed by the private health insurance industry, and the latter into a series of personal retirement accounts managed by Wall Street. In addition, they planned to cut taxes by 20%, increase military spending and cut back on social programs and domestic discretionary spending, all supposedly for the purpose of balancing the budget. Obama and the Democrats simply could not have agreed to any of these proposals and still had any hope of being reelected so they openly opposed them. Ryan and Romney essentially ran of this platform in 2012 and lost, so there is no chance that it could be passed now since Obama would veto it. Even so, the Republicans still retained control of the House by a slimmer margin, and even though they lost seats in the Senate they still have enough to maintain the filibuster.
Given these political realities, there is almost certainly going to be no grand bargain or great compromise to resolve these issues in the near future, and perhaps there should be none. After all, public opinion polls have shown quite consistently that the majority of people would prefer to keep Social Security and Medicare more or less as they are, without any major cuts or ‘reforms’, and that they distrust the Republicans more than the Democrats on these issues concerning taxes, budgets and social programs. Obama and the Democrats almost certainly did better on these issues in the general election than the Republicans, so unless the situation changes radically in Washington over the next three years, very little will in fact change in this area. Obama will still have a veto until 2016, and even if the Republicans pick up some House and Senate seats in 2014 they are unlikely to be able to alter the balance of power in any major way. At some point, they will also have to realize that if their policies are too unpopular with the voters it will damage their chances in presidential and senatorial elections. Of course, the public has been quite cynical and negative about government and politicians in general ever since the days of Vietnam and Watergate. Public alienation has increased during the recent recession, but even so, what journalists and television pundits call gridlock and divided government actually reflects the extreme political, policy and ideological differences between the two parties today, and this will not end any time soon.
REFERENCES
Memoli, M. (2013). “Paul Ryan says Obama Seeks ‘Political Conquest’ in Second Term” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2013.
