The Rise of the Reverse Houdinis

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

So let’s see: The solution to large-scale abuses of the financial system, a
breakdown of the private sector, extreme economic inequality and the failure of
companies and individuals to invest and create jobs is—well, to give even more
money and power to very wealthy people, to disable government and to trust those
who got us into the mess to get us out of it.

That’s a brief summary of the news from the Republican Party this week. It’s
what Republican candidates said during the Washington Post-Bloomberg debate, and
it’s the signal Senate Republicans sent in voting as a bloc against President
Obama’s jobs bill. Don’t just do something, stand there.

Those who have plenty of capital to invest are holding back because consumers
don’t have enough cash. But let’s not give potential middle-class buyers jobs
and money to spend. No, let’s heap yet more resources onto investors. And if
sharp guys made fortunes writing abusive mortgages, let’s repeal all the rules
we just passed to prevent them from doing the same thing again.

Better yet, don’t blame the people who got the windfalls. Blame poor people.
Thus did Rep. Michele Bachmann place responsibility for the mortgage mess on the
Community Reinvestment Act, a law aimed at preventing discrimination against
people in neighborhoods, many of them predominantly African-American, where
banks wouldn’t make loans. The CRA had nothing to do with the proliferation of
subprime mortgages; old-fashioned greed did the trick there. But it’s so much
easier to pass the buck to the powerless. They don’t make many campaign
contributions.

Then there is Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, the only policy proposal to get
really serious attention at Tuesday’s encounter. The biggest flaw in Cain’s
scheme barely got discussed. It is designed to shift the tax burden away
from the wealthy and toward the middle class and the poor by cutting income,
corporate, capital gains and estate taxes. It would then collect a lot of new
money from a 9 percent federal sales tax, layered on top of existing sales
taxes. Plutocracy, thy name is 9-9-9.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who dominated the debate, is much
smoother than his adversaries. He even had some good words for the struggling
middle class and spoke with concern about getting health insurance to children.
(Romney’s desire to provide poor kids with a chance to see a doctor will surely
bring down upon the architect of Obamneycare charges of socialism.)

For the most part, though, Romney was selling the same wares as everyone
else. “The answer is to cut federal spending,” he said. “The answer is to cap
how much the federal government can spend as a percentage of our economy and
have a balanced budget amendment.” But wait: This was the answer to every
question that was posed in New Hampshire. There’s no problem that can’t be
solved if the federal government just does absolutely nothing about it.

And thus spoke Republicans in the Senate on the same day as the debate. In
any other democracy, we would say that Obama’s jobs bill passed its first test
in the Senate because 51 out of 100 senators were for moving it along. But not
in America, where we now require 60 votes to get a bill out of the
Senate—despite the fact that our Constitution, supposedly so revered by
conservative “strict constructionists,” says absolutely nothing about a Senate
supermajority.

The jobs bill is a pretty simple mix of tax cuts and spending on popular
items such as schools and roads. Its core idea accords with what the vast
majority of economists (and a lot of business people) think needs to be done
now: In the absence of private-sector investment and job creation, the federal
government should be the investor of last resort to get the economy moving. This
should be an urgent priority with unemployment stuck at more than 9 percent.

But no, “don’t do something, stand there” is the order of the day. Every
Republican senator present voted to block the jobs bill. Government is to be
powerless because the country’s most energetic ideological minority has declared
that it must be powerless.

Years ago, Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat much maligned during
the Post/Bloomberg debate, introduced me to the concept of the “Reverse
Houdinis.” They are people who tie themselves up in knots and then declare, “I
can’t do anything because I’m all tied up in knots.” We seem on the verge of
putting Reverse Houdinis in charge of our government.