In a town known for being full of proud self-identified wonks, and think tank prophets who worship at the altar of the spreadsheet, there is, perhaps, no greater shrine than the House Committee on Ways and Means. The only body with tax-writing powers recognized by the Constitution, it is where lobbyists go to seek their version of nirvana–the maximization of marginal tax breaks for their clients.
It’s also now, as of the start of the 114th Congress, run by a man who has staked a name for himself by giving a wave of far-right wing callousness an air of intelligence–Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was virtually an unknown quantity until he pushed versions of Medicare and Social Security privatization in early 2010. Although he reached across the aisle in December 2013 to end, in earnest, right-wing obstructionism that caused historic levels of Congressional gridlock, the damage had been done by a movement Ryan, in part, led. As The Guardian reported, winners of the accord included deficit hawks and the Department of Defense and its well-fed contractors. Among the ranks of the losers were the unemployed, Medicare providers, the unemployed, young aspiring retirees, and “everyone on food stamps.”
As Ryan, on Tuesday, prepared to gavel in his first oversight committee hearing with the Secretary of Treasury as a witness and austerity as the new normal, righting accident of birth injustices were not seriously expected to be in the cards.
“Welcome to the Committee on Ways and Means hearing. This is not the Agricultural hearing,” Rep. Ryan said at the top of panel with a joke, causing himself to chuckle into the microphone.
After Ryan praised the administration for pursuing free trade deals and “taking baby steps” toward simplifying the tax code, ranking member Sander Levin (D-Mich.) offered a full-throated defense of the budget released on Monday by Obama Administration. He described it as “not envy economics,” hitting on a description Ryan had given the proposal on Sunday, but they are “everyone economics.”
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew echoed Levin’s appraisal, touting the recovery as “well established” and characterized by “self-sustaining growth,” albeit without benefits “shared more broadly.”
“What we call middle class economics,” Lew said, is what was being sought.
The budget, as The Sentinel noted, would mostly increase spending on national security-related programs, while widening some tax breaks for the lower nine deciles. The “well-established” recovery, meanwhile, has occurred, with a significantly smaller percentage of workers and job seekers than there were before the recession. In 2014, there were more children on food stamps than there have ever been.
The hearing thus seemed more of a tug of war over which tortured data and arcane tax policy Congress and the administration should prioritize. Ryan peppered the sole witness with parochial inquiries. The duo, at the chairman’s request, discussed paying for sequestration relief, “business reform instead of corporate” reform with respect to “pass throughs,” tax reform funding the highway trust fund, and “EITC [earned income tax credit] fraud” not through additional enforcement but by altering the rules. The ultimate inquiry seemingly aimed at tightening the screws on an income transfer that pads the paltry wages of some 26.2 million working Americans — a “Path to Prosperity,” indeed. Levin, meanwhile, pushed back on the technical aspects of corporate tax reform and EITC fraud enforcement, via points about Internal Revenue Service appropriations. He then asked Lew to expand upon the administration’s vision for middle class economics–one heavy on education and infrastructure and light on worker-empowerment, even though Obama was the first President in decades to fete organized labor at the State of the Union.
Briefly, the veil of pedestrian discourse was pierced, and serious discussions about the dynamics of power took place. First, Rep. Kevin Grady (R-Texas) interrogated Secretary Lew, forcing him to issue a non-admittance admittance about the administration not being prepared to offer an alternative, should the Supreme Court invalidate insurance premium subsidies offered under Obamacare (Lew noted, in his defense, that oral arguments haven’t even begun on the case yet—they’re scheduled for early March). Secondly, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) pressed the Secretary on the expected winners and losers of Trade Promotion Authority. “I don’t see the jobs in this bill,” he said. Lew replied that trade “grows middle class jobs” while simultaneously arguing that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will “drive standards up”–the former is a dubious assertion, the latter–as The Sentinel has repeatedly reported–Congresspeople are unable to verify.
But perhaps the exchange that best illustrates the primacy of technocracy and the authority imbalance it has fueled came as Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) grilled Lew about student loans backed by the Treasury Department.
“Can you give me any reason why students can’t renegotiate their loans,” he asked. “If they took a loan out at nine percent from a bank, why does it have to stay at nine percent for the rest of their life? On my house, I’ve renegotiated my loans three or four times, bringing it down to a lesser rate. Why can’t students do that?”
Lew replied that “student loan programs are designed to give very favorable access to credit, but the rates are not always at a level that feel competitive with what would be available if they were a different kind of credit worthy borrower in the market.”
“I think the challenge here is to work through these issues to make sure that students know all of the options that they have to repay their debt,” Lew added, before listing some of them.
“Did you understand the financial system when you were 20 years old?” McDermott shot back, interrupting Lew.
“The financial system was simpler when I was 20 years old,” the Treasury Secretary replied with something of a sheepish smile, “but probably the answer is not as much as I should have.”
