An Integrative Solution

When Senator Packwood was asked who deserved credit for passage of tax reform, he replied, "God, I think."^[166] Although it will be hard to improve upon this definitive source, the reader will have to put up with some less inspired explanations.

Following a headline that neatly summed up the matter—"How Tax Bill Breezed Past, Despite Wide Doubts"—Stephen V. Roberts of the New York Times quite properly began by asking why many legislators voted for it despite their qualms. Representative George E. Brown, Jr., a California Democrat, was typical: "I'm going to vote in favor of the bill. But I have severe reservations about it. I did not find any support for the bill out in my district, and I don't want to make too many of my constituents mad at me."

Speculating on what might have been the strongest factors in resolving these doubts, Roberts emphasized leadership, especially President Reagan's. He argued the president succeeded in defining the issue. "Moreover, Mr. Reagan made tax reform his clear priority for his second term. He 'isolated the one thing he wanted to do,' Mr. Gephardt noted, and did not clog the agenda with other plans. As a result, leaders in both parties felt compelled to support the measure." The Speaker, for example, told House Democrats that if they blocked the bill, they would be giving Mr. Reagan "a club to hit us over the head with from now to November." Roberts also claimed that Rostenkowski's reputation as "a man who remembers his friends and gets even with the rest" did not hurt.^[167]

None of this explains, however, why leaders "felt compelled to support" tax reform. The Speaker, for example, did not feel compelled to support aid to the Contras, or the MX, or defense spending. Reagan's insistence that tax reform stay on the agenda obviously was critical. But if he succeeded in defining the issue, why could he do that on tax reform but not on other matters? Because neither Republicans nor the public at large seemed to care about reform, why was it a club to hit Democrats?

Whatever might be said of President Reagan's or Dan Rostenkowski's leadership, or Speaker O'Neill's institutional loyalty, or Senator Packwood's instant conversion—none of it explains why they all differed on so many issues but worked together on tax reform. Nor, whatever their degree of cohesion, can it explain why tax reform struck so responsive a chord among so many otherwise disparate politicians.

Writing in the Congressional Quarterly, Eileen Shanahan gave an institutional explanation:

what really made the legislation happen was the conviction, right across the political spectrum, that both lower rates and cutbacks in special preferences were necessary not just to get a bill through Congress but to deal with a troubling cynicism in the body politic.^[168]

Certainly, the devotions of many senators, including Packwood, Moynihan, and Bradley, were based on feeling that the legitimacy of the tax

system had been undermined and had to be shored up, by drastic change if necessary.

Yet many good things, supposedly necessary to legitimize the political system, do not come to pass. This book is about one of them: budget balancing. Surely the deficit was as great or greater an institutional concern than the tax system. Why was tax reform easier to manage?

Normal political analysis involves looking and seeing who is helped and who is hurt by a proposal. If it passes, those who were helped must be stronger than those who were hurt; if it fails, then vice versa. Perhaps a proposal will pass after modifications to gain allies. This approach is always useful, but with tax reform we have a problem: the people who ended up doing well—the general public and the working poor—had not been beating down the doors for tax reform. Does this make the standard analysis irrelevant? No, but it is only partially useful.

Answering "who got what" cannot tell us why tax reform got on the agenda or why it would not go away. It can help us understand why tax reform was not stopped: unlike the various "three-legged stools" of deficit reduction, it did not penalize everyone equally; like the successful deficit reductions, it isolated minority voting blocs.