Republicans are not fiscally responsible

By Ezra Klein

In the Clinton era, and then again in the Obama era, congressional Democrats operated under "paygo" rules. Paygo meant, quite simply, that each dollar of spending or tax cuts had to be matched by a dollar of spending cuts or tax increases. They didn't always follow it -- emergency spending, like for the war or the stimulus, didn't fall under paygo, and nor did the extension of the Bush tax cuts -- but generally speaking, they did.

In the Bush years, Republicans didn't use paygo at all. That's why neither the tax cuts nor Medicare Part D even pretended to be paid for. But the Boehner Republicans just won an election by fretting over deficits. It would look sort of bad to repeal paygo on day one.

So instead, they're neutering it. House Republicans are adding it with something called "cutgo." Under cutgo, tax cuts don't have to be paid for, and spending increases can't be offset by tax increases. The idea is that the only two things you can do are cut spending and cut taxes.

This is part of a broader problem for the Republicans: Having convinced the country that we have a deficit problem, it now seems obvious that taxes will have to go up, particularly on the rich. So Republicans have begun to argue that the problem is spending, not taxing. And as Digby notes, when they commit to a new argument, they commit to it: Rather than just repeat the point, "they also institutionalize their ideas with rules and procedures to make it seem as if there's just no other way to think about it."

It's important to understand this in context of the potential compromises over the next few years. For instance: We need to reauthorize the Surface Transportation Act, which is our main vehicle for infrastructure funding. It's usually funded by the gas tax. Under cutgo, there's basically no way to do that: You can't offset a spending increase with a tax increase. It's not just nuts as a matter of budget arithmetic, but it's nuts in a way that has procedural teeth. That makes compromises that much harder.