David Brooks Wants The President To Promote Big Ideas Like The Small Ideas Favored By Conservatives

I keep posting op-eds by David Brooks because he is an opinion maker. His job is to bring the better educated readers of the NYT into the conservative camp. They are too smart for Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. This article is another example of how he works his magic.

Brooks begins by accusing the president of ignoring the "big" ideas that came from the Simpson-Bowles committee that attempted to reduce federal budget deficits. A lot of people believe that it is important to deal with our long term budget outlook, and I agree. On the other hand I did not see many big ideas in the Simpson-Bowles plan. It was top heavy on non-defense spending cuts and weak on ways to increase tax revenues. It had little to say about how to deal with the number one problem in the growth in federal spending. That is, arresting the rising price of healthcare services.

Brooks then paints a picture of a country that is in deep trouble and he accuses the president of attacking a big problem with small ideas. He gave some examples of big ideas, like simplifying the tax code, that would have made him happy. That is a small idea that has been a theme of the GOP for a long time. The basic problem with the tax code is not that it is too complicated. The problem is that it has been made less progressive over time. The president chose that problem to address for a good reason. I can't imagine a more boring topic for a State of the Union speech than focusing on the details of the federal tax code. Moreover, a large portion of those details were put there by the GOP as favors to their special interest groups. They only use tax code simplification as a euphemism for a flat tax.

If we grant Brooks his complaint that the president's speech did not contain enough big ideas, what can we conclude from his final paragraph? He lists a view of the traditional GOP ideas that have become very stale and which are not very big. They just happen to be the ideas that he likes. He assumes that we have a welfare state that the GOP should and can address with big ideas. He also mentions tax policy changes without telling us what they are. Perhaps he should write a boring article on changes in the tax code that reduce its complexity. He is much smarter than that. There would be few readers for such an article.