The Non-Contract With America--What Democrats Aren't Saying About Their Agenda

From The Wall Street Journal
Editorial
October 28, 2006

[House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has] kept her Members tight-lipped and unspecific ...

This is in notable contrast to 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans ended a 40-year Democratic House majority by laying out a 10-item agenda known as the Contract with America. What Democrats are campaigning on this year is a Non-Contract with America--mostly generalities about "helping the middle class" and "ending the corruption in Washington."

As a campaign strategy, this may well pay off. But if they do win, Democrats will have to fill their campaign vacuum with something, and the best clue to what that would be is what they've already proposed. ...

Tax increases. The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, and any chance that they'll be made permanent will vanish with a Democratic Congress. The question is whether Democrats will try to raise taxes even sooner. ...

Ms. Pelosi says reversing [the] tax cuts "at the high end" would be "an earlier resort." This would raise the top income and dividend tax rate back to 39.6% from 35%, and the capital-gains rate back to 20% from 15% ... Economist John Rutledge estimates that raising the dividend rate alone would reduce the value of the S&P 500 stocks by between 5% and 8.5%, roughly a $500 to $700 billion decline in the wealth of the 52% of American households that own stock. ...

Democrats have also pledged to restore so-called pay-as-you-go budget rules, which sound like a restraint on budget deficits but in practice restrain only tax cuts. ...

Health-care regulation. ... Michigan's John Dingell, who would run the Energy and Commerce Committee, has co-sponsored the "Patients Before Profits Act" that would gut funding for the new Medicare Advantage plans that are proving so popular with seniors. Instead, he and the other Democrats who run health-care panels want to direct all seniors into a single government-run Medicare drug plan. Another proposal from top Democrats, the Medicare for All Act, would make all Americans, of any age, eligible for Medicare and pay for it with a new 1.7% payroll tax on workers and 7% on employers.

Ms. Pelosi has also pledged to pass, in her first 100 hours as Speaker, legislation to require the government to "negotiate lower drug prices." That's a euphemism for imposing price controls on new medicines, which can take as much as $800 million in research and development to bring to market. ...

[A]nother top priority for Democrats is the Employee Free Choice Act, which has at least 215 co-sponsors in the House and 44 in the Senate. This would allow labor to turn workplaces into union shops without an election or secret ballot. Unions would merely have to gather signatures from a majority of workers at a work site, which means labor organizers could strong-arm employees who opposed such a petition. ...

Democrats have also moved well to the left on trade since the Bill Clinton-Nafta era. ...The entire Democratic leadership opposed free trade with tiny Oman and with Central America, so deals now in the works with Vietnam and other countries would also be long shots. ...

Energy. The Pelosi Democrats favor a "windfall" profits tax on oil companies and a virtual moratorium on drilling for more domestic oil in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf (where the U.S. may have more energy than Saudi Arabia). These policies would make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. ... And lobbying would begin for the U.S. to sign the Kyoto Protocol ...

We could go on, in particular in the regulatory arena ... But you get the idea. A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate ... elections have consequences, and we thought our readers might like to know about them before November 7.

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