From today’s New York Times.
The party’s deficit-cutting agenda relies heavily on reducing taxes for the wealthy, which irks middle-class voters, and cutting spending on government programs, like Social Security and Medicare, that are popular with many voters.
This has it exactly backwards. The party’s agenda is not deficit-cutting that chooses reducing taxes for the wealthy as a means to achieve that end. The party’s goal is reducing taxes for the wealthy, and uses deficit-cutting as a political game to achieve that end. Whenever there has been a conflict between the deficit and the rich in the party’s actions, the rich have won.
Consider the estate tax. The GOP was more than happy to add hundreds of millions to the deficit with no offset of any kind. Why? Because the benefits all went to the rich.
Or consider the recent fiscal cliff insanity. Remember what going over the cliff meant. It meant greatly reducing the deficit. Increase revenue (through taxes) and decrease spending. If the GOP’s goal was truly deficit reduction, this would have been a dream proposal, they would have happily sailed off the edge. However, because it contained increased taxes for the wealthy, they had to be against it. And note how the estate tax was one of the elements in the bargain, even though it would seem to be a minor part of the issue.
The modern republican party is based around one idea. That idea is consolidating more and more of the national income and assets to the wealthy.