IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…
Capito talks taxes, A Pledge to America on NPR’s “All Things Considered”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130791991
October 24, 2010 - GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
If most poll numbers are right, Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives after this November's election. And many GOP candidates are promising to undo some of the big policies pushed by President Obama, things like health care and financial regulation.
But above all are calls to cut spending. So how will the GOP do it? That's our cover story today.
In a moment, we'll hear from a top Republican House member about the specifics. But first to another time and another midterm election, this one in 1874.
Now, back then, Republicans dominated American political life. And according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, they were fundamentally remaking America.
Ms. HEATHER COX RICHARDSON (Historian): So you have the Republican Party dramatically expanding the vote by giving the vote to African-Americans and also flirting with the idea of giving it to women as well, a lot more people voting than there used to be. At the same time, you have a dramatically expanded government. You have federal taxes for the first time. You have very high tariffs for the first time. You have the government providing land for farmers and providing education and doing all sorts of things it had never done before.
RAZ: This was the period of Reconstruction, right after the Civil War. There were federal troops scattered throughout the South to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment, laws that banned slavery and guaranteed men the right to vote.
Ms. RICHARDSON: The Democrats argue in the South that what's happening in the South under the Republicans is socialism, that in fact the vote has been spread to people who don't have property, who don't have education and they say don't want to work. And what they are doing is electing people to office who will redistribute wealth, who will take in tax money and hand it back to these same poor, uneducated, unwilling-to-work people in the form of all sorts of benefits that they didn't have access to before the Civil War.
RAZ: There were calls from some quarters to take back America. At the same time, the country was in an economic depression triggered by a financial crisis in 1873, and anxiety was the watchword.
And so by 1874, in the midterm election, Democrats were swept into power. Republicans lost 96 seats. And soon, Democrats chose Samuel Randall as the speaker of the House.
Ms. RICHARDSON: Under Speaker of the House Randall, they decide that they're going to make a stand, and they're going to remove federal troops from the South once and for all, and they're going to make it a crime for the federal government to be involved in protecting black voting.
RAZ: And so the 1874 midterm, says historian Heather Cox Richardson, effectively marked the end of Reconstruction.
Now, the changes happening in America today are not as fundamental as those in the early 1870s. But things like the health care bill and the stimulus package have created unease among a segment of the American public, the perception that government's growing too large and moving too quickly.
And Republicans are promising to address that anxiety. So I asked Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, a leading Republican in the House, to explain what the party plans to do on Day One if it wins back control of Congress.
Representative SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO (Republican, West Virginia): Well, assuming that the tax relief portions of the extension of the 2001, 2003 tax extensions haven't been passed, that would be the first thing, I believe, that would come to the floor.
RAZ: The so-called Bush-era tax cuts that cut taxes on both middle and upper-income Americans.
Rep. CAPITO: That's correct. We have to provide the certainty to our small-business folks, our job creators, where their taxes are going to be in the next at least year, and on and on, so that they can plan.
RAZ: Now, as you know, with every tax cut, there are consequences as well because the deficit would increase without an equivalent amount of spending cuts. So how do you offset those tax cuts?
Rep. CAPITO: Well, I think specifically if we went back to the 2008 pre-stimulus funding levels, we would save $100 billion right there. We could put a cap on discretionary spending.
And then we have the You Cut Program. We've had 11 votes of where we could cut specifically, ranging from, you know, disallowing subsidies for first-class tickets on Amtrak to getting rid of the signs for the American Renewal and Reinvestment Act, all kinds of things that have come from across the country.
RAZ: The largest chunk of non-mandatory spending in the federal budget is defense-related. Now, as you know, even Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking for ways to trim spending there. Is that a good place to begin making cuts?
Rep. CAPITO: Well, I think everything has to be on the table, and defense spending has to be a part of that. The secretary, I believe, has put forward a plan, and I can't remember the savings, but it is significant and still maintain the troop levels, the safety levels that we're currently pursuing in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
RAZ: Let me ask you about the biggest chunk of the federal budget, because if you just take Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, as you know, we're talking about 42 percent of the federal budget. This is mandatory spending. Do you think Republicans should be prepared to go right after Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to begin a serious look at how to cut back on those programs?
Rep. CAPITO: I think we would be wise to do it, but the mistake in the logic is it can't just be the Republicans formulating this. When you talk about something as deeply personal to the American family as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, this is where I think, hopefully, we can, you know, take down the hammers and try to find a bipartisan solution. But the longer we wait, the harder it's going to get.
RAZ: What about the health care overhaul that the Democrats passed? I mean, do you think it's realistic and possible for Republicans to begin to unravel that?
Rep. CAPITO: Yes, I do think it's possible because the date of which it is initiated in full is not until 2014. I've said, you know, repeal and replace. I can't go for repeal without replacing. We need health care reform, and I think many of us believe this.
RAZ: So - but I mean, in terms of actually repealing it, that's probably unlikely because, of course, the president would veto that. So do you think the strategy would be to kind of defund it?
Rep. CAPITO: Portions of it. I think there will be probably efforts to strike maybe the individual mandate, the portion of the 1099 onus on small businesses. There are things we can go to right away where we can strip away some of the more onerous portions while keeping what I think are some good things.
RAZ: Congresswoman Capito, if Republicans win the House and become the majority party, are you fairly confident that you'll be able to pass a balanced budget?
Rep. CAPITO: That's a goal, a lofty goal. But I don't think that's a reachable goal in the first year that - of next year. Congress needs to be very disciplined in this. So I think you'll see a movement towards that, but I don't believe that achieving a balanced budget in one year is realistically achievable.
RAZ: That's Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
Congresswoman, thank you so much.
Rep. CAPITO: Thank you.
RAZ: Maya MacGuineas has been described as an anti-deficit warrior. She heads the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget. It's a group that pushes for fiscal restraint.
Maya MacGuineas, welcome to the program.
Ms. MAYA MacGUINEAS (President, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget): Thanks for having me.
RAZ: So you just heard Congresswoman Capito talk about some of the possibilities out there. Does it sound realistic? Or did you think that there was too much focus on generalities?
Ms. MacGUINEAS: Well, I would probably say both. So first, for campaign rhetoric, I thought there was an awful lot of realism in some of the things she said.
For instance, she pointed out we're not going to see a balanced budget next year. In all reality, we're probably not going to see a balanced budget in the next decade. But that was good that she wasn't sort of making the false promises of what we can hope to have.
She talked a lot about things, I think, would be great to see, sort of more bipartisan cooperation on efforts on public policies. The bigger questions, though, are, is that realistic in the political arena?
I mean, this is going to be a tough campaign. Things are already ugly on Capitol Hill, and is this campaign going to leave things even uglier?
RAZ: In the Republicans' Pledge to America, it talks about making unspecified cuts, cuts that might save the federal government 50 to $100 billion. That's really not going to be enough, right? I mean, there have to be some kind of serious spending cuts and perhaps even a tax increase if Republicans really want to shrink the deficit, right?
Ms. MacGUINEAS: No, that's right. I mean, the Pledge to America, that's a campaign document, and it's not filled at all with the real policies that are going to address the debt problems that we have in this country.
First, when you look through it for entitlement reform, which is really the first step or key to all of this, I think entitlements are mentioned twice in the entire document.
RAZ: And that's already 40 percent of the federal budget.
Ms. MacGUINEAS: Not only is it the biggest part of the budget, it's the biggest part of where the growth in the budget is. So you basically cannot fix the budget without fixing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
RAZ: But nobody wants to talk about it.
Ms. MacGUINEAS: Nobody wants to talk about it, and it's really - it's the big three that are missing from this campaign.
RAZ: One of the things that Republicans are talking about is scaling back the Obama health care provision. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over 10 years, it will save, what, about $100 billion. That's an argument that Republicans dispute. They say that they can save more money by repealing it. What do you make of that?
Ms. MacGUINEAS: Well, there's no question that as it's scored, over the first decade, the health care bill is a money saver. And over the second decade, it's likely to save even more.
There are a lot of big ifs. That's if Congress sticks to all the hard parts of the bill. My concern is what they do is they repeal the hard parts - paying for it, reductions in the Medicare - and keep the good parts in, sort of giveaways, expanding coverage, subsidies for people, or replace them with other giveaways.
RAZ: If you were advising the Republicans - say, they win in November, and they become the majority party, and they come to you, and they say, Maya, we want a nonpartisan person to tell us what we have to do, right now, where do we cut?
Ms. MacGUINEAS: I think the first place where you'd start is thinking about freezing discretionary spending. And you would do that by bringing slight cuts in the beginning and then really not letting it grow as quickly as it generally does.
And that's a good start, and it buys us some time. But it only buys us the time until you phase in the bigger entitlement reforms, which you want to do more slowly, to allow people time to adjust to the programs.
The final piece of realism that this whole discussion needs is you just can't do it without looking at taxes. For all...
RAZ: You've got to raise them.
Ms. MacGUINEAS: There's no way to get the numbers to add up...
RAZ: You have - effectively, what you're saying is you cannot cut the deficit only by making spending cuts. And Republicans also want to offer a tax cut, extend the Bush-era tax cuts. That's not enough.
Ms. MacGUINEAS: I mean, the discussion that we're having about taxes right now in the campaign is the opposite of what it should be. It's the two parties battling over whether to add $4 trillion to the debt or $3 trillion to the debt.
So when the first step of every discussion is do you want to make the tax cuts permanent or just most of the tax cuts permanent, you know that we haven't really woken up to the challenges ahead of us.
RAZ: That's Maya MacGuineas. She is the president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. That's a nonpartisan group here in Washington, D.C., that promotes fiscal restraint.
Maya MacGuineas, thank you so much.
Ms. MacGUINEAS: Thank you.
