He explains why he doesn’t want to do point/counterpoint Marketplace segments against Robert Reich anymore: “although I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy — low taxes, restrained government, less regulation — it’s pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis — very intense crisis — I’m just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days.”

I think sometimes about an alternate history scenario in which somehow the McCain campaign uncovers the mythical “whitey tape” in October of 2008 and wins the election despite the unpopularity of the GOP. You could imagine McCain and Ben Bernanke pursuing a short-term stabilization policy of low interest rates and massive payroll tax cuts, paired with a longer-term agenda of aggressive militarism and entitlement rollbacks. Liberals would naturally have genuine concern that the short-term payroll tax cuts would feed into the longer-term agenda of gutting the welfare state. There would be temptation, under the circumstances, to try to adopt the view that temporary payroll tax cuts aren’t “really” an effective counter-cyclical policy and that McCain was merely failing to address the deep structural problems in the economy. Even monetary easing would come under a cloud of suspicion as it became desirable to believe that only wholesale root-and-branch rejection of McCainism could possibly restore the economy.

And yet the reality is, as Frum says, that short-term stabilization policy is both extremely important and also basically independent of the issue of whether in the long run a low-tax low-service equilibrium is better than a high-tax high-service one.

Ross Douthat and David Frum argue about whether the GOP needs to do better at targeting relatively prosperous educated professionals (Frum) or economically struggling cultural conservatives (Douthat). Ross frames the dispute:

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed “lower-middle reformism,” you’re going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another – one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn’t finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous “kitchen table” issues – public education and transportation, crime and health care costs – and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be “pro-family” without abandoning the GOP’s core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand – call it “upper-middle reformism” – and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you’re talking to a “post-material” group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming – making Frum’s vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit.

On the environment, I think there’s a heavy dose of false choice here. Say the Republican Party did whatever it is Ross thinks it ought to do on economic issues. That would require the government to raise some level of revenue. And if there were a carbon pricing scheme adequate to avoid the worst consequences of catastrophic climate change, that would bring in some level of revenue. The level of revenue would be high, but it would also be lower than whatever quantity of revenue is necessary to run government à la Douthat. So carbon pricing could cover some portion of the costs, with other taxes being lower than they otherwise would have been. It would be win-win — a Republican Party that has a reality-based view of climate change to appeal to upscale postmaterialists and also one that does more on kitchen table issues.

The point is that while I think there are serious arguments on both sides of the question of to what extent should carbon pricing be revenue neutral (i.e., offset by corresponding reductions in other taxes, or else rebated to the population somehow) or instead used to finance green investments, there’s no serious argument that failing to price carbon is preferable to pricing it.

In a political debate undistorted by the influence of special interest money, the left-right ideological dispute would take place along that dimension with people on the right arguing that the revenue should be used to cut taxes and the left arguing that the revenue should be used to hike spending. Indeed, note that even if environmentalists are massively overstating the risks of climate change, a revenue neutral carbon price would still make us no worse off economically than we currently are, and would probably have substantial public health benefits. But instead, there are various politicians (from both parties, I hasten to ad) in the pocket of energy or auto interests and plenty of funds going from oil and coal firms to think tanks that hire people to pooh pooh the problems of climate change and so forth. And that, in turn, creates this false sense of a need to choose between an agenda to appeal to the working class and an agenda to appeal to the sort of upscale types who are more likely to care about the environment.