By Michael Barone
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The likely presidential nominee of the Republican party
and the certain (barring indictments) nominee of the Democratic party have
something in common, something more than residences in New York: campaign
appeals based on nostalgia.
Consider Donald Trump’s official campaign slogan, “Make
America Great Again.” His reference point is not the Founding Fathers, whom
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz frequently invoke. It’s also not the New Deal, the
civil-rights revolution, or post–World War II European socialism, which Hillary
Clinton and Bernie Sanders sometimes celebrate. No, Trump is invoking Ronald
Reagan and the America of a generation or so ago.
But his policies are plainly incapable of restoring that
imagined past. He talks of expelling (temporarily?) 11 million illegal
immigrants and building a fence, eight years after net immigration from Mexico
fell to zero.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, in contrast, advocate
enforcement measures (such as e-Verify and visa tracking) that would give
illegals incentives to leave. And looking to future needs, Rubio and Cruz
support changing policy to favor high-skill immigration rather than the
low-skilled immigration and family reunification that current law allows.
On trade, Trump threatens to use current presidential
authority to start a trade war, which, as Cruz explained, will mean much higher
prices for diapers and kids’ school clothes at Walmart. Trump promises that all
those auto-assembly jobs lost 25 and 35 years ago will somehow reappear.
That ain’t going to happen. In contrast, his rivals’
proposals for vocational education could help non-college-educated men qualify
for high-skill manufacturing jobs likely to open up in the future.
On Social Security, Trump echoes Democratic politicians
who, despite clear demographic projections, say the program can continue as is.
No higher retirement age, no limiting increases to inflation, no downward
adjustment of benefits for high earners, as Rubio proposes and Cruz partially
endorses.
Trump’s position is a shining example of Baby Boomer
selfishness. He was born in 1946, generally considered the first year of the
Baby Boom generation, as were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But Clinton at
least toyed with seeking needed changes in entitlements, and Bush expended
political capital in doing so.
Trump says that things will be fine for the next 22
years, when he will turn 92. It’s the same mentality as that of public-employee
unions and (mostly Democratic) public officials who have burdened states such
as Illinois and California with pension burdens that threaten to gobble up the
rest of government: Hey, it’s not my problem.
Boomer selfishness and solipsism are apparent also in
Hillary Clinton, who turns 69 this year, and Bernie Sanders, who turns 75. For
some people, it’s always time for Woodstock. Back then, in 1969, most liberals
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a prominent exception — thought there was nothing
that government couldn’t do.
Sanders’s promises of free health care, free college
tuition, and free Ben & Jerry’s (just kidding about that last one) ignore
the copious evidence that government is getting worse, not better, at delivering
on its promises.
Even a brief look at Britain’s National Health Services
shows that it holds down cost by denying care. The Scandinavian nations whose
example Sanders cites have been cutting back on welfare benefits and cutting
taxes to encourage economic growth. Also, Sweden and Britain have been
providing school choice.
Clinton, like Sanders, wants to lock downscale children
in failing public schools; teachers’ unions come first. They apparently haven’t
noticed the dismal selfishness of Veterans Affairs bureaucrats or the
incompetence of Environmental Protection Agency personnel who let loose tons of
pollutant in Colorado rivers and failed to protect against lead in the water in
Flint.
Back in 1969, people assumed they could take economic
growth for granted; regulation and higher taxes seemed cost-free. So Sanders
wants to altogether ban fracking — one of the few vibrant sources of growth in
the Obama years — and Clinton promises to pretty much shut it down.
Those acquainted with the longer run of history know that
free enterprise operating under the rule of law has enormously improved life
for billions of people — producing “the great escape” from poverty described in
a 2015 book of that name, by Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton.
Nostalgic politicians, such as central planners Clinton
and Sanders and billionaire dealmaker Trump, promise to effortlessly reproduce
supposed glorious pasts. Free-market politicians, such as Rubio and Cruz, have
the harder task of promising a better future they cannot exactly describe,
because markets always produce surprises that planners can’t anticipate.
Rubio may be stopped in Florida, and Cruz may not hold
Trump below the 1,237-delegate majority. But give them credit for thinking
seriously about the future.
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