Winning the Next Ohio

In my column for The Week I explain why voters rejected John Kasich's anti-collective bargaining bill and what can be done to allow bills like that to succeed in the future:

Republicans have been looking to cuts in future retiree benefits as a way to avoid future tax increases. In the Republican imagination, it's either-or: Either we cut benefits — or else we face a future of ever-rising taxes. Republicans have chosen the benefits cuts. Governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Ohio's John Kasich, Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Mitch Daniels of Indiana have tried to impose discipline on local contracts while struggling to hold the line on taxes.

Ohio should be a warning: This either-or approach is dangerous.

If leaders want to summon voters to sacrifice for the benefit of future generations, those sacrifices have to be seen as broadly shared. If, however, leaders try to load all the sacrifices onto just a few voters — while exempting or even rewarding others — the targeted groups will resist. Sometimes that resistance will fail, as it did in Wisconsin. But it will succeed often enough to wreck the whole project.

At the national level, the unevenness of the sacrifice looks especially extreme.

Paul Ryan's budget roadmap won the votes of all but four House and four Senate Republicans with its ambitious vision of stringent cuts in Medicare benefits for people now under 55, combined with generous tax cuts for upper-income federal taxpayers. As yet, probably relatively few Americans have heard of the roadmap. But when they do hear of it — and President Obama's re-election fund is accumulating $1 billion with which to inform them — they're likely to react negatively.

Perhaps that negative reaction can be over-ridden. If Republicans win the presidency and the Senate in 2012, and if the CBO cooperates in allowing them to introduce the Ryan budget in a way that forbids a Democratic filibuster, then maybe they can muscle through a budget that ends the Medicare guarantee to finance a cut in the top tax rate from the current 35 percent to a future 25 percent. Maybe.

But that's not the end of the story. As an observer of Congress once quipped: "It's not over till it's over — and it's never over." The social consensus to sustain budget austerity over the years and decades ahead must rest on a broad social agreement that the austerity is both necessary and fair. Republican governors have done a good job selling the "necessary" bit. If they want to avoid more Tuesdays, they need to work on the "fair."

Click here to read the full column.