They did it in They did it again when Obama got elected. They did it when Clinton got elected. But in point of fact, if you look at the strength of the modern Republican Party, 24 states have a Republican governor in both houses, and you got another seven states, 31 states have both houses Republican. That means the state wants to be Republican, but in Louisiana, our candidate had too many girlfriends.
But 31 states elect both houses Republican, and of those 24 have a Republican governor as well. The money that used to go to the school now goes to the parent and it can go to homeschooling, parochial school, public school, private school, anywhere.
And then North Carolina just voted to phase out their corporate income tax completely. And to take their corporate rate down from five to about 3. And Republican governors are passing legislation and legislatures to allow doctors and anybody else with a government license, the state license to do anything. This is passing state by state.
Giving people much more ability to move from place to place. They can rent out one of the rooms in their home. This is being done by millions of people all over the country. Now their house is an asset. Democrats are always talking about redistricting.
But he lost because he raised taxes, broke his word. US Congress runs this country. Presidents start wars every once in a while. Congress raises taxes, cuts taxes, spends money, passes laws. President signed bills, or not. Congress runs the country. We had a one-party state from to , interrupted for four years.
The Mexicans kept less control of their government pre … over that year period, so four years of Do not raise taxes. Now what else you got? And if you walk in with that commitment, then the Republican Party is competitive with the modern Democratic Party, which it was not before. And add to that the support that we give to workers to avoid being trapped into unions, to avoid having to have union dues taken away from them, the tremendous success of the Janus Bill, which means all government employees can never be forced to join a union.
Oren Cass: Yeah. Labor is an interesting issue in this context, I guess, thinking about the fortunes of workers generally. And it is increasingly difficult for a family, especially someone, say without a college education, to make ends meet. Or do you see it differently?
Grover Norquist: Oh, no. Look, the government takes by force a third of the income that Americans burn and spends it as they want to. Oren Cass: Okay, sure. Grover Norquist: No. And what they did was make a whole bunch of people dependent, made them less able to get to work, subsidized non-work.
We have a welfare check. So one of the things we need to do is stop doing things that are stupid and destructive to people. Oren Cass: I just want to understand the argument here. Are you saying that the expansion of the welfare state has suppressed the wages of the typical worker? If anything, I would have expected it to better his position.
Grover Norquist: Well for starters, the money that you spend on welfare has to be taken from somebody. And if you take it from a corporation, the corporation can raise prices, which is not helpful for workers because they have less ability to pay for the things that they need to do in their life. All the government regulations that make it difficult for people to work more than they can, I mean, the number of … US Chamber of Commerce had a list going into the first Trump years of a million jobs that are waiting on a permit.
A government permit was denied, and there were a million jobs ready to go if the government would allow a permit for a new bridge or a new road or a mine or something like that. So government permitting, government regulations, a lot of the more extreme environmental stuff kills work.
It makes you not able to do things that people would like to do. Certainly, the zoning laws make it difficult to build houses in the United States. Jack Kemp used to point out that a quarter of the cost of a new house were regulatory burdens. That makes it difficult for people to have the size house they want for their family, and it makes it more expensive for them to buy the house, and it delays the house getting done. I mean, there are a whole series of things. Step one.
Is the government doing something that makes somebody worse, makes things worse off? Allowing people to move from one state to another and take their occupational license with them just makes life easier for workers. And again, the lower taxes you have, the more people create jobs in that state. The idea that people want more government would make sense if people were moving to the high spending states, if they thought that they were getting real quality.
I mean, in New York, they spend twice per capita on government what Florida spends; they must be getting something for it. Or maybe not. Oren Cass: Well, I at least had been asking about the wages of the typical worker who was working and trying to support a family. And I think you certainly make a good point that taxes take something out of the economy, regulations interfere with economic activity.
Presumably, that affects the businesses as well though. And so I suppose one of the striking disconnects that we see is between the rate at which wages have risen versus the rate at which profits and share prices have risen. When we cut the corporate rate, every American with a utility bill saw their utility bills reduced.
Because the utility commissions allow federal taxes to be passed straight through to people who have water and natural gas or electricity utility bills. And so you saw people getting hit with higher utility bills because of the higher corporate taxes. When we cut the corporate tax rate, they got reductions in what the utility bills were going to be. And there are going to be substantial increases if the Democrats put it back up again. And it affects you if you work for a corporation, because where do you think they get the money?
They pay you less. They raise prices. They collect taxes from consumers, some from investors, and some from workers and lower pay. The election bought them momentum. Here are supposedly the 60 most powerful words in all of politics:. Washington calls it The Pledge. Republicans call it common sense.
Democrats call it somewhat more unprintable things. Written by Grover Norquist and signed by all but 22 elected Republicans on Capitol Hill today, it is a simple promise to never, ever raise taxes. And, since , Republicans on Capitol Hill never, ever have. When President Bill Clinton raised taxes in his first year in office, he received exactly zero Republican votes.
The Pledge had build a steel curtain between the tax raisers and the GOP. Four years later, Clinton cut investment taxes.
Four years after that, President George W. Bush cut taxes again. And then again. We've never raised them since. But in the wake of President Obama's victory last Tuesday, Norquist's steel fortress is creaking.
The White House insists that there will be no deal to avoid the fiscal cliff unless taxes go up for the richest slice of American households. John Avlon. For instance, if I were in Congress in , I would have signed a declaration of war against Japan. I'm not going to attack Japan today. The world has changed, and the economic situation is different. And on CNN last weekend , LaTourette and Rigell told Ali Velshi that they thought the straitjacket pledge was an impediment to dealing with the deficit and the debt.
This post-election outbreak of pragmatism is welcome and needed. These senators and congressmen are profiles in courage for speaking out against the stranglehold that one self-appointed activist and lobbyist has had on bipartisan governing. Norquist, who leads the conservative activist group Americans for Tax Reform, is both a colorful character and committed ideologue, infamous for sound bites like this: "I don't want to abolish government.
I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. The signature item for Americans for Tax Reform is a pledge that commits signers to oppose any tax increases at all, for all time -- not just tax rate increases, but any increases in tax revenue.
News: Graham says he'd break no-tax 'pledge'. This distinction makes a real difference in the current deficit and debt deal negotiations. Going back to the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the obvious common ground for negotiations has been for Democrats to compromise on spending cuts and entitlement reform and Republicans to compromise on increased tax revenue.
This can be done -- as the Bowles-Simpson Commission demonstrated -- by potentially even lowering some tax rates but closing loopholes to raise revenue. This is what's known as a win-win. The biggest stumbling block for tea party conservatives has been Norquist, who says any new revenue violates the pledge and promises to invite a primary challenge to any member of Congress who puts revenues on the table.
Given the number of safe seats carved up in the rigged system of redistricting, a primary challenge from the wings is what most members of Congress fear most. The result is gridlock: an inability to reason together and make a long-term deal for the good of the country.
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