Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness<\/p>\n
Free-marketers are right that tax cuts stimulate economic growth that in turn lead to expanding production and eventually more federal tax revenue.<\/p>\n
But the problem traditionally has been that to obtain tax reductions, Republicans also have had to sign on reluctantly to larger expenditures. Or, worse, they willingly believed they could spend more, simply because more money poured into the federal treasuries.<\/p>\n
George W. Bush doubled the national debt. After running against Bush profligacy (remember the\u00a0Chinese credit card trope<\/a>), Barack Obama doubled it again by doubling Bush\u2019s levels of borrowing. Conservatives blasted Obama for his even greater lack of thrift. The Tea Party movement\u00a0emerged<\/a>\u00a0in reaction to reckless expenditures and borrowing to fund Obamacare.<\/p>\n Now Donald Trump is caught in the same old matrix. His deregulation, tax cuts, and energy expansion will likely increase federal revenue. But his various budget concessions and his own proposed increases in\u00a0defense spending<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0would likely bleed the budget at a far greater rate than the growing federal revenue.<\/p>\n Once again, new spending will discredit conservative vows of budget prudence and supply-side economics. (Budget-wise, what good does it do to expand the economy if the political price is acquiescence to ever greater and costlier government?)<\/p>\n Trump is blasted for not filling federal positions and for his threadbare staff. In reality, he probably gains support for the mere appearance of parsimony. He should press that advantage by enacting a government hiring freeze and a pay-as-you-go philosophy, even if at first it is only symbolic.<\/p>\n If Trump wants to build the wall and \u201cmake Mexico pay for it,\u201d why not simply slap a 10 percent tax on the $50 billion in remittances that flow annually to Mexico and Latin America, largely from illegal aliens and foreign nationals? In addition, the government could help fund the wall with fees and fines from DACA qualifiers who seek green cards.<\/p>\n If Trump wants a huge private-public partnership to build infrastructure, why not, at a time of record oil production, increase the federal gas tax for three or four years to pay for the project? What better way to ensure the entire idea does not end up like California\u2019s stalled and ever more costly high-speed rail project? If Trump wants family leave and other popular entitlements, why not calibrate the costs as users\u2019 fees paid out from an individual\u2019s\u00a0future Social Security payments<\/a>?<\/p>\n Eight years of traditional stimulus such as massive budget deficits, near-zero interest rates, and huge increases in federal spending did not lead to much economic growth. But those policies did result in record debt. As the economy grows, we will see interest rates rise and growing deficits that are not so easily serviced.<\/p>\n Trump may not have run as a budget cutter, but he did campaign against traditional Republicanism that, hand-in-glove with Democrats, had ballooned the national debt to $20 trillion. The populist move would be to protect the public and stop the massive borrowing.<\/p>\n Finally, if Republicans believe that the public does not care about deficits and debt, or that belt-tightening before an election is suicidal, then let them at least stop harping about spendthrift progressive policies when out of power. Yappy ankle-biting is not an endearing trait.<\/p>\n Why Republican Stereotypes Are Stereotypes While in Dubai,\u00a0Bush criticized<\/a>\u00a0the Trump Administration\u2019s lack of progress on immigration reform. Then he weirdly noted,\u00a0\u201cAmericans don\u2019t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees, but there are people who want to put food on their family\u2019s tables and are willing to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Where to start when Republican elites confirm their own stereotypes?<\/p>\n First, Republicans should agree with Churchill\u2019s dictum about the inadvisability of criticizing one\u2019s government while in a foreign country:\u00a0\u201cWhen\u00a0I am\u00a0abroad\u00a0I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my own\u00a0country. I make up for lost time when I come home.\u201d\u00a0Bush repeatedly followed that guidance when he insisted that he would not attack Barack Obama\u2014even at home. But not now.<\/p>\n Second, Bush is far more critical of Trump\u2019s efforts to reach a compromise on DACA and border security than he was of Barack Obama\u2019s illegal and politically expedient 2012 pre-reelection executive order nullifying immigration law and enforcement. Whether he intended it or not, Bush\u2019s \u201cwoke\u201d emergence as a megaphone after eight years of hibernation, confirms the impression that Republican elites were always much closer in spirit to their Democratic counterparts than they were to their own so-called grassroots conservative base. Translated, they mildly were displeased with the Obama agenda, but loathe Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n Third, how incoherent were Bush\u2019s cotton-picking riffs! (He may not have realized it, but Bush put a 21st-century spin on 19th-century plantation owners\u2019 pleas that they needed imported chattel African labor because American workers were neither acclimatized to heat nor inexpensive enough to pick cotton in scorching Southern temperatures). Bush substantiated the stereotype of crass corporate concern (note the inadvertent contempt in \u201cwilling to do\u00a0that<\/i>\u201d) that trumps both the law and the idea of promoting the wages of U.S. entry-level workers\u2014as well as general popular cluelessness about illegal immigration in general.<\/p>\n To wit, cotton picking (which I used to do as a child in the 1960s on my father\u2019s small 40-acre cotton allotment) has been widely mechanized for over 50 years. And agriculture now only accounts for\u00a0about 10-20 percent of illegal alien labor<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mechanization has revolutionized farming, even in crops once deemed impossible to automate such as nuts, olives, raisins, and delicate Napa Valley wine grapes. New computerized and laser-calibrated breakthroughs will likely mean that even soft fruit and vegetables will soon be mechanically picked, matching ongoing labor reduction in weeding and irrigation.<\/p>\n More importantly, it was not just the Trump tax and deregulatory reforms that have fueled economic growth and prompted workers\u2019 wages to rise,\u00a0but also the substantial drop in illegal immigration.<\/i>\u00a0In the new psychological climate that\u2019s followed, employers are beginning to believe it is no longer worth the risk to hire illegal aliens, as they scour the economy to find citizen workers (in the inner city, the red state postindustrial swath, and the barrio) and pay them more to reenter the workforce.<\/p>\n When the country has a 63 percent labor participation rate, there are more able-bodied workers than we assume, even as unemployment measured by traditional rubrics is about to fall below 4 percent.<\/p>\n The old Republican idea that illegal immigration is a good thing because noble foreign nationals work hard and cheaply for businesses in a way unemployed Americans \u201cwill not do\u201d is not a sustainable factual, ethical, or political position. About half of illegal immigrant households use\u00a0some sort of government assistance<\/a>, for example.<\/p>\n Mechanization, automation, and higher wages for labor are the future of the American workforce. If we learned anything from the 2016 election it is that we should reject the calcified idea of corporate importation of inexpensive laborers from impoverished countries, profiting from their peak productive years, and then as they age, tire, and become ill, passing them on to the social welfare industry to rely on taxpayer-subsidized health, legal, and education services\u2014even as firms seek out yet a new, young, and recyclable cohort from Mexico and Latin America.<\/p>\n Fantasies of a\u00a0new Bracero Program<\/a>\u00a0are the pipe dreams of those who did not grow up with it. Few remember how workers often physically resisted returning home, how the Mexican government stole guest workers\u2019 wage deposits, how illegal labor coexisted with sanctioned imported labor (what would a bracero do when he decided not to return home?), how corrupt was the distribution of braceros to particular farms, and how an entire protest movement, from documentaries like\u00a0\u201cHarvest of Shame\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to Woody Guthrie\u2019s\u00a0\u201cDeportee,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0reduced the program in the public mind to something like\u00a0Spartan helotage<\/a>.<\/p>\n To promote something like \u201cthat\u201d while abroad in Dubai of all places, home of multi-billionaires and impoverished guest workers, and in the context of \u201cpeople\u201d who are to \u201cpick cotton at 105 degrees\u201d reflects why\u00a0both<\/i>\u00a0Barack Obama and Donald Trump were elected and why a traditional Republican will probably not win again in our lifetimes.<\/p>\n Republican Culture Trumps Politics It was Mitt Romney who said he could not work with 47 percent of the population and wrote them off as hopelessly lost voters. It was David Brooks and Bill Kristol who caricatured the white working class as near Neanderthal and romanticized illegal aliens (often by deliberating conflating them with legal immigrants.)<\/p>\n If one were to read carefully through the disparagement of Americans in the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, with\u00a0their slurs against<\/a>\u00a0hillbilly Virginians and Texans and smelly Trump supporters, one can see that Strzok appears likely to be a suburban Republican or independent of the sort who would vote forJohn Kasich<\/a>.<\/p>\n The point is not that Strzok and Page are hyperpartisans, but that they are comfortable with candidates who foremost reflect their cultural tastes and proper\u00a0cursus honorum<\/i>. And as we have witnessed with some in the NeverTrump movement, for these sorts, being grateful that new economic policies might reinvigorate the old rust-belt and the hinterland is more than offset by the concomitant price of an ascendant working class that lacks the tastes of the elite and the romance of the deliberately distant poor and minorities.<\/p>\n The Trump catharsis has shown that about 10 percent of the Republican Party, the NeverTrumpers, was largely\u00a0apolitical<\/i>. That is, former cornerstone positions of deregulation and tax reform, oil and gas production, charter schools, deterrent foreign policy, restoring friendship with Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were apparently always secondary to the more important criterion of offering a mild, sober and judicious frown to progressivism, through discerning losers like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.<\/p>\n Such a Republican elite was so embedded within American establishment institutions as to be both immune from the economic stagnation of an Obama neo-socialist revolution (remember income inequality soared under Obama) and in no real need of a Reagan revolution or Trump\u2019s often messy radical push-back against progressivism.<\/p>\n Its creed was not really, as advertised, the ethics of \u201closing nobly is better than winning ugly,\u201d but rather the snobbery of \u201closing a cultural image is worse than winning a political agenda.\u201d Put more bluntly, it is better to put up with a socialist with a \u201cperfectly\u00a0creased pant\u201d\u00a0than a prairie-fire conservative in rumpled Walmart slacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Free-marketers are right that tax cuts stimulate economic growth that in turn lead to expanding production and eventually more federal tax revenue. But the problem traditionally has been that to obtain tax reductions, Republicans also have had to sign on reluctantly to larger expenditures. Or, worse, they willingly believed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1161,1123,1098,1092,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2QN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":0},"title":"Obama Derangement Syndrome?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u2019d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you\u2019ve lost your mind. \u2014 John Edwards When does the legitimate \u201cI oppose Obama\u201d descend into the illegitimate \u201cI hate Obama\u201d? It is popular now to suggest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8965,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-failings-among-the-reasons-for-trumps-rise\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Failings among the Reasons for Trump’s Rise","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services Three truths fuel Donald Trump. One, Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster. If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2016"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2016","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/campaign-2016\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":137,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bush-reconsidered\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":2},"title":"Bush Reconsidered","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online George W. Bush left office in January 2009 with one of the lowest job-approval ratings for a president (34 percent) since Gallup started compiling them \u2014 as compared to Harry Truman\u2019s low of 32 percent, Richard Nixon\u2019s of 24 percent, and Jimmy Carter\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10876,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-resistance-to-nullification-to-what-next\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":3},"title":"From Resistance to Nullification to What Next?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 10, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \u2014 National Review Trump\u2019s critics ratchet up to insurrection, but Trump\u2019s tax reforms and our growing economy could derail their dreams. George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Democrats"","block_context":{"text":"Democrats","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/democrats\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2590,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-psychology-of-debt-obamas-rendezvous-with-political-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":4},"title":"The Psychology of Debt: Obama’s Rendezvous with Political Reality","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Debt Matters Over the last two decades it became an article of popular faith that budget deficits did not matter that much. Conservatives began to talk of annual red-ink in vague terms of percentages of the gross domestic product rather than in real billions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2009"","block_context":{"text":"July 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/july-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1460,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-unbound\/","url_meta":{"origin":10961,"position":5},"title":"Obama Unbound","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a Commie appeaser. 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\n<\/b>George W. Bush, a good man without malice, nonetheless last week illustrated why Donald Trump is president.<\/p>\n
\n<\/b>We rightly associate the elite disdain for the clingers, irredeemables, and deplorables with progressives like Obama and Hillary Clinton. But politics is incidental to the matrix;\u00a0more essential is class<\/a>.<\/p>\n