The Pledge to America is Not a Joke

It does, however, indicate that the GOP is not serious about governance. Here’s Rodger Malcolm Mitchell:

See anything wrong with these nice, safe political “pledges”? If you make the tax cuts permanent, give extra tax deductions to small business, fully fund missile defense and strengthen our border, there is no way to reduce spending to the 2008 levels and reduce the deficit — nor should we. Reduced spending (aka “money creation”) would doom us to an immediate return to recession. All six depressions and nearly every recession immediately have followed reductions in deficit growth. The reason: Federal deficits provide the money for economic growth.

And Ezra Klein:

At the end of the day, America may be an idea — but it is also a country. And it needs to be governed. This proposal avoids the hard choices of governance. It says what it thinks will be popular and then proposes what it thinks will be popular — even when the two conflict. That’s an idea that may help you win elections, but not one that’ll help you govern a country.

However, he points out in another post that the Democrats need a forward-looking plan to, rather than resting on past achievements:

Dedicating themselves to any or all of those policies would make for an exciting agenda. In the absence of such an agenda, however, it just seems like the Democrats are running on the fumes of the past two years. The voters deserve better.

What we have, then, is one party that has no incentive to govern, and another party that is ignoring its own incentives to cast light on that fact. Depressing stuff.

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