As we grimly march ever closer to the 2016 election, the economic policy orientation of the Republican Party comes into closer focus, too. And it's clearly top-down class warfare.
Though there are several varieties on the theme, the underlying motivation of this policy stance is that rich people have too little money. And that means just about everyone else — especially the poor — has too much.
You can see it from state-level Republicans, who are hunting around for something to do after passing a bunch of contract subversion laws making it harder to organize unions (or as conservatives call them, "right-to-work" laws). They've settled on axing Depression-era "prevailing wage" laws, which stipulate that workers on government contracts must be paid roughly the going rate for that sort of labor in the area. A repeal measure has passed in Indiana and one is on deck in Wisconsin.
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Conservatives argue that this is about getting a good deal on public spending, which may or not be technically correct. But the interesting thing is how this puts the lie to previous conservative arguments regarding unions. Their anti-union stance is usually justified by bank-shot arguments about faster wage growth. But the whole point of abolishing prevailing wage laws is to pay workers less. The priority is clear.
When talking about abridging freedom of contract between employers and unions, conservatives argue that this creates fast growth and thus faster wage growth. This is nonsense — the fastest the U.S. economy has ever grown has also been at the absolute height of union power — but at least there is a rhetorical feint in the direction of workers.
Not so when it comes to prevailing wage laws. Originally, the point of these rules was to prevent government workers from undercutting the local labor market and thereby reducing overall wages. These days, it's more of a quasi-wage support program for local construction workers — both private and public. Abolishing it is a way to save the government money by paying workers less.
Now, the question of efficient spending is an important one, especially in a county like this one where infrastructure costs are so high. However, going full skinflint and paying workers as little as possible is not how Sweden or Spain get their low prices — and being a cheapskate can backfire too, as shoddy construction leads to delays, cost overruns, or early repairs. Check out the long-delayed transit center in Silver Spring, Maryland, for an example.
At any rate, it's obvious that these Republicans are not remotely interested in high-quality, affordable infrastructure. Just like with George W. Bush in 2000, or Sam Brownback, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker today, conservatives are interested in big tax cuts for the rich. Paying workers less is about creating budget headroom for new tax cuts — or patching big budget holes created by old tax cuts, as all three of the above GOP governors have done in the past few years.
What motivates this behavior is an interesting question. As the party with a firm belief that market capitalism produces morally perfect outcomes for everyone — that everyone has earned their place in society — plenty of Republicans naturally tend to assume that poor people are lazy drug addicts.
But more generally, as Dylan Matthews points out, top-down class warfare automatically pops out of the interaction between several ironclad conservative commitments: large cuts to taxation, large cuts to government in general, and large increases in military spending. Their commitment to reducing the deficit is almost as transparent a fiction as their concern for workers, but it does box them in to some extent.
That set of priorities is what produces the Paul Ryan budget, or even more extreme, the Rand Paul budget. Start there, and one can't avoid becoming a Bizarro World Robin Hood who takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
