Politics, Leadership And Campaign-Finance Reform: We need a government that’s free of the corruption of special-interest money
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I won election to Congress as a conservative Democrat the same night Ronald Reagan was elected as a Republican president. Today I would have been called a blue dog Democrat, but Tip O’Neill called us boll weevils because we attacked the entrenched Democratic majority just like they were a cotton field ripe for harvest. Tip had a way with words.
When I got to Washington, we signed up to rebuild America, and I was proud to work with President Reagan as he tried to remake our government. I remember well the fight for President Reagan’s first major legislative effort, a fundamental change to our tax system. I was a supporter of the change, one of the many Reagan Democrats who crossed party lines to give the Gipper his first important legislative victory.
Among the most important ideas in the Reagan tax bill was a critical supply-side component called the Research and Experimentation tax credit. This proposal cut taxes up to 20 percent for qualified research expenditures and was intended to incentivize investment that otherwise would not be made. There were some on our side of the aisle who were skeptical the change would work. They worried this cut would reduce revenues substantially without actually changing the incentives of business to invest. So at first the Democratic leadership opposed the idea.
But the Republican administration was so sure of this idea that they made an offer too good for even the Democrats to refuse. The administration suggested that the tax cut be temporary and that after a reasonable period, we would ask the economists of the nation whether it had, in fact, worked. If it had, we could then make the R&E tax credit permanent. If it hadn’t, it would fade away. After a few years, the reviews were in: the R&E tax credit was an unmitigated success.
But here’s the puzzle: in the almost 30 years since we enacted the tax credit, Congress has yet to make it permanent. Instead, every couple of years Congress brings it to the floor and votes it up again. Why is this? Why does a tax policy so obviously good for jobs and good for American competitiveness not become a permanent part of the tax code? Because any time there’s a permanent and wealthy interest on the other side, you can expect our tax system to make their benefits temporary so that each time there’s an election, there’s an endless list of people calling to donate to the campaign funds of members of Congress.
The tax code ought to be clear and simple and progressive and fair. It ought to reward job formation. It ought to reward small businesses, which create two out of every three new jobs. It ought to make America a tax haven to get capital from all over the world invested in our nation. It does none of these things. Instead, the tax code is thousands and thousands of unreadable pages. We craft an insanely complicated system of special favors to the richest and most powerful in our society so Congress can better collect campaign contributions and lobbyists can assure permanent clients. The tax system is about campaign financing. It’s about money.
Far more profound than the loss of civility within the halls of the Capitol is the fact that our Congress has become obsessed with raising campaign funds. It defines the devastating change that our Congress has undergone over the past 30 years since I walked those halls.
We don’t govern, we grovel. We don’t lead, we collect.
We need a government that’s free of the corruption of special-interest money. In my view, we won’t fix Congress, we won’t fix government, and we won’t regain the respect of the American people until we fix this. And thus all of us—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Tea Partiers, and progressives—need to focus on how to fix this. There is no problem more important for us to solve—not a debt that’s mightier than a mountain on the chest of our children, not the loss of manufacturing jobs in an astounding percentage, not the existence of inequity and a playing field completely unlevel in the American landscape, not the business of alternatives to poverty, not our addiction to foreign oil or foreign credit—because until we confront money in politics, we won’t have the capacity to solve this almost endless list of critical problems. Leadership not free to lead does not lead, cannot lead, and will not lead…