(3 of 6)
Meanwhile, the G.O.P. has left untouched the generous benefits that favor the rich, like home-mortgage deductions for mansions and second homes. Corporate giveaways in the form of specialized tax breaks and farm subsidies to agribusiness remain in place. Defense contracts of questionable utility are protected. When Gingrich ran into heavy lobbying from doctors on Medicare reform, he gave them almost everything they wanted.
To defang government, Gingrich would defund it. He and his party are insisting on $245 billion in tax cuts as a centerpiece of their effort. But is this great tax reduction flowing back into the pockets of all Americans? No. The tax reductions were, in part, a sop to the G.O.P. moralists who bemoan the dissolution of the family. The "family" tax cuts were aimed at people raising children, but not at all people raising children. The credits are worthless to the families in which a third of American children live, because those families don't earn enough to pay income tax. Those families and their employers pay plenty--15.3%--in payroll taxes, but the G.O.P. tax credit doesn't help them there.
The G.O.P. revolutionaries have also voted to reduce taxes on the less than 1% of Americans who inherit property worth more than $600,000, a reduction that would cost the Treasury $27 billion during the next decade. Capital-gains-tax reductions directly benefit only the 7% of mostly wealthy households that profit each year from the sale of stocks, real estate and investments other than their home. Meanwhile, the Republican Congress has voted to raise taxes on the working poor by cutting the earned income-tax credit.
It won't do to be too prissy about absolute fairness, to expect that Newt and his cohort would not reward followers and punish foes. On the other hand, by not demanding some sacrifice from his own supporters, Gingrich and his movement risk being seen as just another engine of interest-group politics, albeit a different set of interest groups. Bill Bennett, the former Education Secretary and maven of the Republican moralists, worries about this. "What's come across quite clearly is that we Republicans are smart and serious and that we are going to shrink the government. What hasn't come across is a lot of compassion. It's not enough to bring down the welfare state; you have to say what replaces it. We lose if we come across as a bunch of mean-hearted creeps. We have to say yes to something. We have to cut welfare for the rich."
Author James Pinkerton, who coined the phrase "the new paradigm" to describe the world that comes after Big Government, agrees. "What the Republicans haven't done," says Pinkerton, a former aide to President Bush, "is convince the people at the bottom half of the economy that there's something there for them. I think they made a vision mistake by not going after corporate welfare more energetically."
What will become of the poor in Gingrich's brave new world? It is the welfare programs themselves that he sees as the problem. Conservative welfare expert Douglas Besharov describes the current system as "a culture of entitlement that has undermined traditional values of education, work and marriage." Gingrich, in his interview with TIME, put it more starkly: "What kind of safety net is it that destroys you? You have a man-eating safety net and a child-eating safety net."