Republican views on taxes change over years
A willingness to consider new things is a hallmark of a mind alive to the possibilities of change. And since change is one of life’s constants, that’s a good thing.
However, some changes are simply too much.
Take the Republican sea-change toward taxes. Once upon a time Republicans were content to view taxation in a strictly utilitarian light. Taxes weren’t implicated in notions of party “values” or ideology. Taxation was neither good nor bad; it was a tool to be used in the public interest.
That was many moons ago. This is now: in this paper, a week ago, state Rep. Matthew Dowling, a freshman Republican, made a fairly astonishing statement in regard to the fiscal stalemate in Harrisburg and measures to cover the $2.2 billion hole in the state budget.
Explaining his opposition to a revenue blueprint that squeezed through the Republican Senate in July, Dowling criticized lawmakers and the Wolf administration for approving a budget in advance of knowing “where the money” to fund it “would come from.”
Fair enough.
He then added the zinger that the General Assembly might, in its haste to finalize a revenue package, become “RELIANT ON UNSAVORY REVENUE SOURCES, SUCH AS HIGHER TAXES.” (Emphasis mine.)
“Unsavory … taxes.” That’s a long way from the oft quoted dictum of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that “taxes are what we pay for civilization.”
It’s equally a long way from President Eisenhower, a Republican, whose pragmatic attitude toward taxes largely reflected his party’s workaday, no-frills approach in the middle of the 20th century.
In the 1952 campaign for president, Ike told a crowd in Peoria, Ill., that one of his goals was to “cut federal spending to something like $60 billion” in his first four years in office, in route to the elimination of the federal budget deficit.
“Yet I could not accept the argument that early 1953 was the time to do it,” not in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Eisenhower later wrote. When the chairman of the Republican House Ways and Means Committee proposed to cut taxes, Ike noted, “I was emphatic in my opposition.”
The Republican president of the United States wanted congressional backing for the extension of an excess-profits tax. A temporary 11 percent personal income tax surcharge was due to expire in June 1954.
Ways and Means chairman Daniel Reed was lobbying for an expiration date six months earlier. The president thought Reed’s proposal was contrary to the national interest.
Using “every possible reason, argument and device,” Ike won his fight over taxes with the support of Republican leaders in the House.
In his memoirs, Eisenhower lifts a passage from his diary of July 16, 1953, to indicate the attitude of some conservative Republican businessmen toward taxes, the public interest and fair play.
U.S. Steel president Ben Fairless came to see him. He quotes Fairless as saying, “The extension of the (excess-profits) tax will cost our company $80 million. We think you ought to insist on extension. You cannot possibly favor one group … at the expense of another.”
These are clearly different times. As Tim Dickinson pointed out a few years ago in Rolling Stone magazine, Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford all fought for higher taxes. When the House passed the Kennedy tax reduction bill, in September 1963, a majority of the chamber’s Republicans voted against the measure.
As for President Reagan, he proposed increased taxes on 11 separate occasions, once he realized the tax cuts he fought for were ballooning the deficit. Reagan, who enjoys a reputation as a tax-cutter, was surprisingly pragmatic on taxes.
According to Dickinson, the Republican tax straitjacket was first donned by Grover Norquist, head of the non-profit Americans for Tax Reform and author of a pledge taken by great numbers of House and Senate Republicans to oppose any and all new and higher taxes.
“I understand greed and envy,” said Norquist, one of whose patrons was Pittsburgh billionaire-publisher Dick Scaif.
“The idea that somebody’s making money and you want to steal some of it? That’s an interesting idea. It’s certainly not justice.”
Dickinson commented, “Such extreme rhetoric -equating taxes with theft — is exactly the kind of thing that dismays old-line Republicans.”
A few weeks ago, state Rep. Gene DiGirolamo, a Republican from the Philadelphia suburbs, broke an unwritten gentleman’s agreement in Harrisburg by proposing to boost the state income tax rate from 3.07 to 3.32 percent, as a way to end the budget deadlock and the chronic underfunding that bedevils state government.
Instead of using bailing wire to jerry rig a budget solution, DiGirolamo offered a more or less permanent fix, though his proposal fell short of covering the entire $2.2 billion budget gap.
According to Matthew Knittel of the state Independent Fiscal Office, “To generate an additional $2.2 billion, the (income tax) rate would need to increase … (from 3.07) to 3.63 percent”, a little more than half of one percent.
It’s a deal Ike just might have gone for.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@ gmail.com.