1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
HOW ISSUE OWNERSHIP DRIVES AMERICAN POLITICS
In March 2012, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a budget resolution that in some sense was decades in the making. Crafted by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI), the plan spelled out cuts to the tax rates paid by many Americans and proposed the consolidation of taxpayers into just two income brackets. The corporate income tax rate would be reduced, too. Although the cuts would be accompanied by reforms designed to broaden the tax base and end distortions and loopholes, total government revenues over the next ten years would still be $2 trillion less than projected by the budget released a month earlier by Democratic President Barack Obama (House Budget Committee 2012).
The budget reflected an alliance between the Republican Party and anti-tax activists that by 2012 had spanned almost forty years. Long ago, Republican fiscal policy had been firmly anchored in the principle of balancing budgets rather than shrinking revenues. But this changed in the 1970s (Karol 2009). The marquee event signaling the party’s embrace of the tax cut agenda was California’s Proposition 13, which wrote strict limits on property-tax increases into the state’s constitution when it was approved overwhelmingly by voters in 1978. The initiative’s champion was Howard Jarvis, an activist who had been working hand in hand with state Republicans to craft tax limitation measures since the late 1960s. He found a natural partner in Governor Ronald Reagan, who had sponsored a failed statewide measure to reduce income taxes as far back as 1973 (Sears and Citrin 1982).
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- Information
- Partisan PrioritiesHow Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics, pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013