Republicans Are Fuckups

I spent nearly forty years as an ardent Republican, so I don’t say this lightly: Republicans are fuckups.

For two years now, they’ve held the White House, the Senate, and the House. Two years to show the working class that the party of “kitchen-table issues” actually gives a damn about the kitchen table. Two years to do something, anything, about the crushing cost of a house, a college degree, and a trip to the doctor.

And what did they do? They pointed fingers. They held press conferences. They raised money off of grievances they had no intention of fixing. Same as it ever was.

Here’s what galls me most. Showing the working class some love wouldn’t have been hard. It wouldn’t have required a new bureaucracy or a trillion-dollar spending bill. It would have required one thing Republicans chronically lack: balls.

Here are three things they could have done if they had any.

1. The Home IRA

I laid this out in The Cheapest Rent You’ll Ever Pay, so I’ll keep it brief. Right now, we subsidize the guy who stays in hock to the bank through the mortgage interest deduction, and we tax the guy who works a second job to get out of hock faster, payroll taxes and all. We subsidize the leash and tax the guy trying to slip it.

The fix: any income earned from overtime or a second job is completely tax-free, with no income tax and no payroll tax, as long as it goes into a Home IRA. The money can be invested and grows tax-free. The account holder closes the account to buy a home or pay off the one he already has.

Think about who benefits. Not hedge-fund managers. Not trust-fund kids. The nurse pulling extra shifts. The electrician doing side jobs on weekends. The young couple working their tails off to get out of their landlord’s grip. That’s the working class Republicans claim to love every election season.

Cost to the Treasury? Some foregone revenue on money that, in a lot of cases, wouldn’t have been earned at all without the incentive. Political risk? Zero. Who’s going to campaign against the guy working a second job to own his home?

And yet. Crickets.

2. A Twenty-Course Degree Option

The standard bachelor’s degree is roughly forty courses. Maybe half of them have anything to do with the degree. The rest are “general education,” a four-year buffet of requirements that keeps faculty employed and keeps students borrowing.

An accounting major doesn’t need a semester of Intro to Film Studies to keep a set of books. A nursing student doesn’t need Gender and Society to start an IV.

So here’s the fix: deny federal money to any college that doesn’t offer its students a choice. Students who want the full forty-course liberal arts experience can still have it. Students who just want the skills for their chosen career can take a degree-specific-only bachelor’s degree of twenty courses or less.

Half the courses. Roughly half the tuition. Half the time out of the workforce. Half the debt. If that isn’t a cost-of-living measure, I don’t know what is.

Republicans have spent decades telling us academia is a left-wing indoctrination mill. Fine. Here’s a way to cut the time young people spend in that mill in half, and to do it by giving them a choice, not by banning anything. A free-market solution, the very thing Republicans claim to worship.

They didn’t lift a finger.

3. Trade NATO for Debt-Free Doctors and Nurses

Western Europe is rich. It’s had more than seventy-five years to figure out how to defend itself. The American taxpayer has been footing a big chunk of that bill since President Truman.

So pull the plug. Wind down America’s commitment to defending Europe and redirect the savings to something that actually helps Americans: paying the tuition of our future doctors and nurses.

There’s one string attached, and it’s the string that makes the whole thing work. Graduates who take the deal agree to accept only cash for their services. No insurance billing. No coding departments. No armies of administrators whose sole job is fighting with other armies of administrators.

What does that get us? Doctors and nurses who start their careers without six-figure debt, and so don’t need to charge six-figure-debt prices. Clinics with posted prices you can actually compare, the way you compare prices for an oil change. And a growing slice of American medicine that competes on price and service instead of on who has the better billing department.

Defending Europe benefits Europeans. Debt-free, cash-only doctors and nurses benefit Americans. If “America First” means anything, it means that.

The Verdict

None of these ideas are radical. One rewards hard work. One gives students a choice. And one stops subsidizing rich foreigners and starts subsidizing American health care workers (directly) and American health care consumers (indirectly). Each is the kind of thing Republicans say they believe in.

But saying is cheap. Republicans had two years with every lever of power in their hands, and the working class is no better off on the cost of a house, a degree, or a doctor’s visit than when they started.

And this is why the Republicans will lose the Senate and the House next Tuesday. Like their Democratic counterparts, they care more about enriching themselves and their crony allies than about making life materially better for the working class. But unlike their Democratic counterparts, they don’t have a lapdog media providing cover for their political bullshit.