Marty Connors, the former chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, published an essay at the end of February 2009 that spent as much of its energy scolding his own party as it did the new administration in Washington.
The occasion was a Newsweek cover story titled “We Are All Socialists Now,” which arrived just weeks after Congress passed the largest stimulus package in the nation’s history. Connors, the 2004 recipient of the American Conservative Union’s Ronald Reagan Award, seized on the magazine’s numbers and turned them into an argument about Republican responsibility.
The numbers he built the case on
Connors led with figures drawn from the Newsweek piece. U.S. government spending was projected to reach 39.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2010, against 47.1 percent in the Euro Zone — a gap of less than eight points. A decade earlier the comparison had been 34.2 percent against 48.2 percent, a spread of roughly 14 points. The distance between American and European government, in other words, was closing fast.
He paired that with a second statistic: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, government jobs, including the military, accounted for about eight percent of all employment in America, and public-sector employment had surpassed manufacturing employment back in the early 1990s. The only growth in union membership, he noted, was in that public sector.
A third figure closed the loop. Roughly three percent of American filers reported incomes above $250,000, and those same filers paid, by his account, 47.9 percent of all federal taxes.
The uncomfortable part
Where the essay departed from ordinary partisan commentary was in its assessment. Republicans, Connors wrote, could point to the war on terror, the economic shock of Sept. 11 and two devastating hurricanes as partial justification for the spending increases of the previous decade. But they also had to look honestly in the mirror at the prescription drug benefit and at the bailouts.
“The first leg of this current marathon run in spending certainly was initiated on our watch,” he wrote. With that permissive green light from Washington Republicans, he argued, the new Democratic majority simply took the political cover it had been handed and did what it had always intended to do.
He then quoted a line he could not source but plainly relished: “Republicans came into power as social conservatives and left power as conservative socialists.”
The question he put to his own side was blunt. “Are Republicans really opposed to socialism,” he asked, “or are we just driving the country in that direction at a slower pace?”
Who counts as the elite
Connors’s second theme was the definition of wealth. If government now accounted for roughly 40 percent of everything the country spent, he asked, were the career managers who administered that share not America’s real new elite? The question was pointed at a president who had, in Connors’s reading, settled the matter by declaring that a household earning $250,000 was rich.
He thought the figure absurd on its face because it ignored geography. A quarter of a million dollars buys a very different life in Opp, Alabama, than it does in Birmingham or New York. Citing a CNBC comparison built on a cost-of-living calculator, he noted that a New Yorker earning $250,000 would need only about $106,000 to live equivalently in Paducah, Kentucky.
Then came the line with a Gulf Coast wink: if the tax plan passed, he wondered, would Alabama simply see even more snowbirds settling in Gulf Shores?
What he wanted instead
Connors did not stop at complaint. His prescription was a familiar supply-side list, offered without apology:
- Cut the top personal income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent
- Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent
- Cut payroll and self-employment taxes roughly in half, from 15.3 percent to 7.5 percent
- Eliminate the estate tax and freeze federal spending
These, he argued, were broadly the things Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy had each had the sense to do.
A word about labels
Connors closed by refusing the charge that conservatives were merely nostalgic. If Republicans were going “retro” by invoking the Reagan years, he wrote, then Democrats who had lost their fear of the words liberal and socialist were going retro as well — back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
His parting note was almost grateful. Before the Newsweek cover, he suggested, anyone who used the word socialism to describe the direction of American policy risked being dismissed as alarmist, reactionary, even goofy. A mainstream newsmagazine had now put the word on its cover, and in Connors’s view that alone had changed the terms of the argument.
The essay landed at a moment when Alabama Republicans were beginning to organize for the 2010 election cycle, and its real audience was arguably not Washington at all. It was a former state party chairman telling his own party that its credibility on spending would depend on whether it was willing to admit what it had already spent.