Kmiec writes: "With respect to family, it has been a good many years since the Supreme Court approved vouchers, yet Republicans have yet to pursue the opportunity. A nationwide voucher effort for math and science, or a voucher for full tuition, for low-achieving children would have plenty of social-science research and support behind it. It would also put families back in charge of the upbringing of their children."
This really isn't a bad idea but there's a reason why it hasn't worked -- it is VERY expensive. There was a pilot project along these lines tried in Cleveland a number of years ago that Milton Friedman examined and found good. But Friedman noted that the amount of money provided per pupil was only about a third of what it would need to be. In practice, vouchers have only worked when the school was a religious one, because such schools are subsidized by an institution that would absorb a significant amount of the real cost either by subsidy or by being able to provide a teaching staff that was willing to work for a pittance.
But education isn't the only area in which something which Republicans want is doomed to fail because of its cost. The Iraq War, whatever you may think of it, became the morass it is today because the Party tried to win it on the cheap. It took four years for them to even commit the limited resources known as the surge, and even then that commitment was clearly defined to be temporary for reasons that are, ultimately, financial. If, as Republicans claimed, the Iraq War was "a war for civilization" to be compared with the fight against Hitler, then no expense should have been spared. The army should have been expanded to meet the case. In point of fact, not one cent was ever budgeted for the war at all -- it has been fought entirely with borrowed money.
The reason for this is simple: the Republican Party is totally committed to the ridiculous idea that its tax cut wing promotes -- that the level of taxation today is "normal" and that cutting taxes is the key to prosperity. This idea is ridiculous to anyone capable of looking at history. Taxes in the early 1940s were higher than they've ever been, and the result was that the Depression ended and the generation which emerged from WWII saw levels of middle class prosperity unmatched since. High taxes didn't CAUSE that, but neither did they prevent it. Taxes were high because we had "a war for civilization" to win and we did what we needed to do to win it, which included making everyone, especially the wealthy, support the effort financially as much as they could stand.
Try making that argument today and you're accused of being a socialist. Ronald Reagan's tax cuts are the poster child for this nonsense -- never mind that Reagan's 1981 tax cuts went nowhere until Paul Volcker cut interest rates in late 1982 and never mind that Reagan, before he left office, actually RAISED taxes on the middle class through payroll taxes. Bush's tax cuts took place during the lowest interest rates in modern history. They get the credit from the tax cut mavens for the prosperity of 2002-2007 when in fact the housing bubble, which underlay that prosperity, was fueled by low interest rates, not tax cuts, which were, for the middle class, pretty much irrelevant. And, of course, at the present moment the numbers show that during the period of the Bush tax cuts the middle class has LOST real income.
And yet, when John McCain -- one of the very few Republicans who was willing to say some of the above in this century -- ran for President in 2008, he felt compelled to take up the Party Line on tax cuts and stick to it until he went down in flames on Tuesday.
Look, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Any conservative can tell you that. But what the tax cut conservatives in the Republican Party have been telling people is that there is a free lunch. You can have tax cuts and win wars and have school vouchers. When people say something like this, it doesn't MATTER if the wars are just or the voucher programs are a good educational idea. They cannot do what they're supposed to do without MONEY, which in turn means taxation.
The Republican Party got away with this in 2000 because it was a time of prosperity (the "outrageous" Clinton tax increase notwithstanding) and it seemed to many as if the country could afford a tax cut. It got away with it again in 2004 because the economy was, again, in fairly reasonable shape and by thumping the cultural issues drum. But by 2008, the game was up and the Democrats nominated a candidate who knew how to build a serious campaign organization. Say goodnight, Gracie.
As long as the tax cutters hold undisputed sway, the Republican Party can only serve one function -- to line the pockets of the wealthy while the rest of the country falls apart.
