Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  All true. In the end, these cuts increased the deficit by another $5 trillion. The cause was a reprise from the Reagan years, and worth remembering now: large tax cuts combined with increased military spending.

  By contrast, Bill Clinton raised the upper income tax rate by 11.6 percent, achieving a budget surplus of $236 billion by the end of his term. Barack Obama’s more modest achievement is to hike the top rate by 8.5 percent, while the percentage of the deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 10 percent to 3 percent. Add to this the small matter of creating jobs: under Clinton, the economy added more than 20 million new jobs—the highest total for the last five presidents.

  The concurrent myth that tax cuts spur economic growth is demolished by a five-decade comparison. In the ’60s, the highest marginal rate was a whopping 91 percent; the average annual growth in GDP was 4.5 percent. In the ’70s, the upper rate declined to 70 percent—so did GDP growth, to 3.2 percent. It remained at 3.2 percent in the ’80s, when Reagan drastically lowered rates, and in the ’90s, when Clinton raised them. When George W. Bush lowered the rates again, average GDP growth declined to 1.5 percent, only to rise again, in the wake of Obama’s tax hikes, to a little over 2 percent.

  The American economy is a complex thing, driven by myriad factors in any given time span. But one thing is clear: the Republican fairytale notwithstanding, there is no correlation between tax cuts and economic growth. In 2012, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said just that; so has a study by Martin Feldstein, Reagan’s principal economic adviser. The coup de grace comes from another Republican, Keith Hall, the current head of the CBO. Hall was brought in by the GOP to calculate projected budgets through a process known as “dynamic scoring,” a highly speculative method favored by tax-cut advocates, in that it incorporates the presumed growth effects of prospective tax cuts. But Hall is an honest man: “[T]he evidence is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. And our models show that.”51

  But here is the most persuasive proof of all: the near-infinite self-interest of most elected officials. If the GOP’s tax cut voodoo actually worked, Democrats would be trampling all over Republicans in a frenzied race to enact it. They aren’t.

  Not so the GOP. Remarkably, its current candidates are doubling down on tax cuts for the wealthy. Here, as often, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are salutary examples.

  To an almost comical extreme, Rubio’s plan scatters golden eggs meant solely for the rich—the total elimination of taxes on capital gains, estates, dividends, and interest income. As for the income tax, he cuts the highest rate by 4.6 percent. In all, Rubio’s gifts to the top 1 percent would hand them 11 percent more income.

  Down the ladder, Rubio increases taxes on much of the middle class, but provides some relief at the lower rungs through child tax credits. But the overall effect is ruinous, particularly to the vulnerable. The Tax Policy Center estimates that Rubio would nearly double the deficit over the next ten years—an average of $414 billion annually above the current $474 billion. And the least affluent would pay the price. Rubio has pledged to boost military spending, and expenditures required by entitlement programs can’t be slashed. To cover his deficit requires massive borrowing—which retards economic growth—or spending cuts. All that is left to cut are infrastructure projects that create jobs or programs for the poor and disadvantaged.

  But Ted Cruz is no lightweight. On top of his own exclusive enticements for the rich is a flat income tax of 10 percent. This would increase the income of the top 1 percent by about 20 percent; for the next level by about 17 percent. The ostensible benefit to everyone else plummets to from 1 to 4 percent.

  But even this is a Trojan horse. For within the Cruz plan is a 16 percent value-added tax on corporations that, like sales taxes, would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices—a far more crushing burden on low-income families than the income tax itself. Another regressive feature is that, like Rubio, Cruz balloons the deficit—$3.7 trillion over the next decade—with the same attendant damage.52

  Just for fun, let’s imagine what would happen if these candidates actually proposed to raise the rate on the top 1 percent. An increase of 7 percent in the overall tax rate, experts say, would generate about $157 billion in revenue—more than enough to pay for Rubio’s child tax credit without any serious impact on economic growth. And even without raising taxes for the upper tier, keeping their rates as they are would lessen the impact on the deficit of tax relief for the middle class and poor.

  So why do Republicans insist on cutting taxes for the ultra-rich while shrouding their impact in mendacious nonsense? Because that’s what their ultra-richest donors want. Rubio’s billionaire soft-money man, Paul Singer, is a fierce proponent of tax cuts for the wealthy. Cruz’s leading patron, tax-phobic billionaire Robert Mercer, clocks in at $20 million; his business is being investigated for $6 billion in alleged tax evasion by an IRS Cruz proposes to abolish. And his next largest soft-money nest egg, $15 million, comes from the Wilks brothers, two billionaires who support the Koch brothers’ anti-tax crusade.53

  Here we get to the biggest plutocratic prize awaiting the winner of the GOP’s tax cut derby: the $900 million pledged by the Kochs to elect the president of their choice. And the brothers are deadly serious about cutting their own taxes—through abolishing the estate tax, drastically cutting capital gains and corporate taxes, and, above all, completely eliminating progressive income tax rates. After all, as their anti-tax front group grouses, a graduated tax rate “removes individuals in the lower brackets from the reality of the cost” of anti-poverty programs. For modest earners, apparently, bankruptcy and suicide is not reality enough.

  As to who will receive the Kochs’ $900 million in prize money, the betting favorite is Marco Rubio—when it comes to the brothers, cravenness counts. But the real victor won’t be their chosen candidate.54 No one knows this better than the Kochs’ fellow billionaire Warren Buffett: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”55

  No kidding.

  Ted Cruz’s Holiday Spirit

  DECEMBER 22, 2015

  This holiday season has offered far too little respite from humanity’s dark side—the hatred and fanaticism that gave us Paris, San Bernardino, Colorado Springs.56 How consoling, then, is Ted Cruz, who offers us the power of prayer and the balm of faith.

  For Thanksgiving, Cruz called on the Almighty “to render our National government a blessing to all the people” and “promote the practice of true religion and virtue.” His Christmas card quoted the Bible: “I have trusted in your loving kindness. My heart will rejoice in your salvation.” Not content with mere random prayer, his website proposed to bind us in a “National Prayer Team.” “Heidi and I,” Cruz assured us, “are grateful for the prayers of people all over this great nation.”

  Lest we need guidance in placing our lips to God’s ears, the website directs that our efforts be “dedicated to a focused season of prayer on behalf of the nation, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, his family and staff, and the campaign”—presumably including its pollsters and fund-raisers. “Members,” we are told, “will receive weekly emails containing prayer requests and short devotionals.”

  Promptly, “Prayer Warriors for Ted Cruz” assured us on Facebook that “God is empowering #TedCruz in such a mighty way.” Wafted by this wave of prayer, Cruz is currently brightening our holidays with a twelve-city “Take Off with Ted Cruz Country Christmas Tour” through the southern primary states—the spiritual uplift of which, serendipitously for the senator, has him pressing Donald Trump for first place in this morning’s latest national poll.57

  So let us examine the senator’s holiday rhetoric, the better to grasp what he is asking us to pray for.

  He predicts that “2016 will be a religious liberty election.” But liberty for whom? Not gays or lesbians, evidently, for whom Cruz has prescribed conversion therapy to cure them of their “choice.”

/>   The freedom Cruz has in mind is for people like Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who denied gay couples marriage licenses. After all, Cruz memorably explained, gays are behind the “jihad”—such an evocative choice of words—“being waged [against] people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.” So deep is Cruz’s respect that he pledges his best efforts to repeal same-sex marriage. “For the sake of this cause,” he adds without apparent irony, “we need to bring people together.”

  Cruz’s God, it seems, is also a gun enthusiast. Shortly after the slaughter in San Bernardino, he starred at a gun-rights rally put on by a group whose self-described mission is to “glorify God in all we do.” Cruz himself reacted to the massacre by proclaiming: “You don’t get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns” but “by using our guns.”

  In Cruz’s world, we may have to. Hours after the massacre, Cruz voted against a Senate measure to bar people on the FBI terrorist watch list from purchasing guns—including the assault weapons used to murder fourteen people. For those puzzled by the senator’s seemingly circular reasoning, it is, perhaps, salient that the NRA vehemently opposed the measure.

  Cruz’s reaction to the Planned Parenthood killings in Colorado Springs was truly original. The shooter’s cry of “no more body parts” caused some to wonder if the heated rhetoric against Planned Parenthood—fervently stoked by Cruz himself—had resonated in the mind of a deranged killer who, like so many other deranged killers, too easily acquired weapons. Not Cruz. Instead, he found a way to conflate two favorite themes: the murderer, he speculated, was a “transgendered leftist activist.”58

  With respect to the tragedy in Paris perpetrated by ISIS, Cruz swiftly cut to the heart of the problem: that President Obama is “willing to use military force [only] if it benefits radical Islamic terrorists”—presumably including, though he chose not to mention this, those on the FBI’s terrorist watch list whose right to acquire weapons of mass murder he voted to protect. But President Cruz will have the answer: “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know whether sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”

  Less aglow was the former commandant of the Army War College—“carpet-bomb,” he remarked, “is just one of those phrases that people with no military experience throw around.” Which perhaps explains Cruz’s bewildering claim that during the first Gulf War “we carpet-bombed them into oblivion” when, as one would expect in the age of smart weaponry, no “carpet-bombing” ever occurred.

  Were your holidays lightened a bit by the Paris Climate Agreement? Not Cruz’s. He seized the moment to chair hearings denouncing climate change as a hoax perpetrated by liberals who “want massive government control over every aspect of our lives.” Among the GOP candidates, Cruz is by far the most vehement in his rejection of climate science: remarkably, the senator purports to believe—in utter defiance of the scientific community—that according to satellite data “there has been no significant global warming for the past eighteen years.”

  One suspects that Cruz knows very well that his climate denial is nowhere close to intellectually respectable. Thus his diversionary suggestion that Obama’s efforts to battle climate change are just another manifestation of weakness in a president who “apparently thinks having an SUV in your driveway is more dangerous than a bunch of terrorists trying to blow up the world”—including, one supposes, those folks on the terrorist watch list. For those attempting to follow this rhetorical bait and switch, it is worthy to note that in only one segment of Americans does a majority reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made climate change is all too real: conservative Republican primary voters, including those clustered in Iowa.

  A particularly dispiriting lump of holiday coal was Donald Trump’s nativism—espousing a massive deportation of Mexicans while proposing to “register” Muslims in America and bar Muslims abroad from traveling here. Artfully aping Trump, Cruz proclaimed himself a “big fan of Donald Trump’s,” commending Trump for “focusing on the need to secure our borders” and echoing his hard line on immigration, and his “Christmas Tour” features an echo of George Wallace’s segregationist pledge, promising to oppose legal status “today, tomorrow, forever.” While modestly demurring to Trump’s worst rhetoric with respect to Muslims, Cruz abandoned his erstwhile devotion to “religious liberty”—opposing a Senate resolution against imposing a religious test for entry into the United States.

  Perhaps, by now, you’ve lost the thread of Cruz’s Thanksgiving call to “promote the practice of true religion and virtue.” Unwittingly recorded at a private fund-raiser, Cruz helped clear things up: stating that Trump and Ben Carson will never become president, he confided that “my approach has been to bear hug both of them, and smother them with love . . . [until] the lion’s share of their supporters come to me.”59

  This, for once, is a window into the depths of Cruz’s soul, long apparent to the political cognoscenti. As a key Republican insider of four decades says flatly, Cruz is relentlessly “Machiavellian—the most calculating man I’ve seen in this business.”

  His current calculation was on sharp display in the most recent Republican debate: eliminate Marco Rubio by tarring him with conservatives as a supporter of “amnesty and citizenship,” and keep in good stead with Trump so as to inherit his nativist vote. Indeed, his Christmas stump speech includes a fresh appeal to the lowest common political denominator: “I think the new politically correct term is no longer illegal aliens; it’s undocumented Democrats”—to which he adds the implication that Rubio talks more favorably about legalization when speaking Spanish on Spanish-language television.

  The simple truth about Cruz, says Eliana Johnson of the National Review, is that “the man who boasts of his ideological purity is perhaps the most obviously tactical candidate.” His path to the nomination runs through Iowa and the Deep South—through evangelicals, gun fanatics, nativists, climate deniers, and social conservatives—and every position he takes is laser focused on winning them over. And it’s working—Cruz has surged past Trump in Iowa and into second place in the latest national polls, and the growing consensus within the Clinton campaign is that Cruz will be the GOP nominee. Cruz, not Trump, is becoming the man to watch.60

  And he bears watching. His holiday rhetoric is not that of a God-smacked extremist prone to verbal excess, but a cold-eyed cynic, a top-tier graduate of Princeton and Harvard who condescends to his target audience for his own narrow ends. For the construct that defines him is not a hard right-wing belief system, but something far more frightening: the barren psyche of a demagogue.

  Classically defined, a demagogue is “a political leader who appeals to the emotions, fears, prejudice, and ignorance of the lower socioeconomic classes in order to gain power.” Thus, as with Cruz, for the sake of stirring excitement, demagogues “oppose deliberation” and “accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness.”61

  Bad enough. But consider the psychology of someone for whom personal advancement obliterates truth or fairness, and who sees others as chess pieces instead of human beings. A week before Christmas, Congress passed a rare bipartisan compromise by wide margins: a spending bill that prevented a potentially ruinous government shutdown—which, had it happened, would have been politically ruinous to Republicans. Protected from the consequences of such a disaster by the Republican leadership, Cruz used conservative talk radio to throw them under the bus: “This is Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan passing the Democratic agenda, funding Obamacare, funding amnesty, expanding low-skilled immigration. . . . It’s an absolute betrayal.”

  This is Cruz—a loner who routinely uses his Republican colleagues as foils for personal attacks, whose private conversation is little different than his self-aggrandizing stump speeches, and who is widely proclaimed as “the most hated man in the Senate.” In self-exculpation for this universal loathing, Cruz mocks Rubio for being adequately socialized—“he’s a wonderful communica
tor, he’s a charming individual, he’s very well-liked in Washington”—and argues: “If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home . . . I will get you home.”

  To a person, Cruz’s colleagues would rather have a beer at home.62 How else to react to a nakedly ambitious man whose behavior and persona suggest the following characteristics: “manipulative,” “cunning,” and “callous,” with a “grandiose sense of self,” “a penchant for pathological lying,” and a “marked lack of empathy for others.” Which, as it happens, are among the hallmarks of a sociopath.63

  Small wonder, then, that of the fifteen candidates followed by the Washington Post’s fact checker, Cruz trailed only Trump and Carson in the percentage of statements rated as “false or mostly false.” It is sobering to realize that if Ted Cruz assures us that something is a fact, there’s a two-thirds chance he’s lying.

  “Any president,” Cruz informs us, “who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this nation.” In truth, pious frauds are not fit to be president, demagogues even less so—whether on their knees or on the stump, seeding America with ignorance and hate for their own narcissistic ends.

  Let us pray.

  The GOP Establishment’s Not So Happy New Year

  JANUARY 5, 2016

  For the established Republican order, the vista presented by this new year is filled with bewilderment and foreboding. For the last twenty-eight years of presidential primaries, the consultants, donors, and loyalists who constituted the party’s so-called mainstream have taken it for granted that, in the end, the “most electable conservative” would once again ward off insurrection by the Visigoths of the GOP’s outer reaches. This serene state of self-assurance has come to an abrupt and unseemly end.