They’re coming. And they will be much more severe than his father’s. Sure, the president may have managed to forestall them until he is out of office – but he will have made them inevitable by his fiscal profligacy; and he will bear primary responsibility for them. Bruce Bartlett is one of the few conservatives to say this out loud. Money quote:
I now believe that the best we can hope to do is make incremental improvements to the existing tax system and hopefully prevent it from getting worse. Unfortunately, because the current President Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed spending to get totally out of control, I believe that higher taxes are inevitable. In particular, the enactment of a massive new Medicare drug benefit absolutely guarantees that taxes will be sharply raised in the future even if Social Security is successfully reformed.
Too many conservatives delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and pork-barrel spending and the budget will be balanced. But unless Republican lawmakers are willing to seriously confront Medicare, they cannot do more than nibble around the edges. With Republicans having recently added massively to that problem, and with a Republican president who won’t veto anything, I have concluded that meaningful spending control is a hopeless cause.
Therefore, we must face the reality that taxes are going to rise a lot in coming years.
I fear he’s right.
FUNDAMENTALISM WATCH: When the FDA advisory committee votes 23 – 4 to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a morning-after contraceptive, it is very, very rare for the FDA to ignore it. But when it comes to science, this administration tends to listen to religious voices as much as scientific ones. David Hager is one of those voices, an unreconstructed fundamentalist who believes that women should submit to men in private and public life. He wrote a memo to the FDA head opposing over-the-counter use and bragged that it had made the difference. I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me.
DOUBTING DOUBT: Ross Douthat adds more nuance to our conversation about doubt, truth and politics. I’m grateful. Nevertheless, I still disagree; and I think our disagreement stems from a slightly different take on what we mean by truth. My worry about fundamentalism in politics is not so much that it posits things as true, but how it does so. A large swathe of fundamentalist conservative politics rests its arguments on simple appeals to Biblical truth, or revelation, or notions of nature that cannot be subjected to skeptical inquiry (i.e. “natural law” that is uninterested in contemporary scientific research and seeks merely to embellish Aquinas with ever subtler forms of ornament). The truth I’m talking about – whose prerequisite is doubt – is an empirical, inferential kind, the kind that arises both from science and human experience and historical reflection; and is always held provisionally. The first kind of ‘truth’ is the kind liberals seek and fundamentalists have found; the second kind of truth is one conservatives are happy to stumble across and hold until a more persuasive account comes along. And in this distinction, I’d argue, lies the real faultline in American politics. Not truth versus relativism; but skepticism versus those claiming to know what heaven is – in order to impose it on earth.
The Dish 