By Dominic Pino
Tuesday, August 01, 2023
Ron DeSantis has finally started to talk about the economy, releasing his campaign’s “declaration of economic independence” on Monday. Let’s start with the good.
DeSantis wants to overturn overregulation through executive orders, extend and make permanent the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, stop the government-backed “transition” to electric vehicles, increase energy production, and get government out of the ESG business. That’s all terrific, and conservative voters should expect these policies from any Republican running for president.
DeSantis knows firsthand the benefits of economic freedom and small government. Florida is a model for what low taxes and an entrepreneurial business climate can do. The state’s constitution prohibits an income tax, and Florida ranks highly on the Rich States, Poor States report on economic freedom by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ninth) and on the State Business Tax Climate Index from the Tax Foundation (fourth).
What’s good for Floridians generally might prove to be a liability for DeSantis politically. Since the state government he inherited already has sensible tax and regulatory policy, all he has to do as Florida’s governor is maintain the status quo, from a conservative perspective. That’s not true of the federal government.
DeSantis is no doubt aware of this fact. His economic plan includes language about dismantling the “fourth branch of government” and being a “new sheriff in town” against overspending. But rather than lead with the positive story of Florida’s experience, DeSantis demagogued economic issues in a way reminiscent of politicians far worse than he.
His plan is chock-full of class warfare. Rather than a message of hope, it begins, “America is in a state of decline.” The reason for the decline, according to DeSantis, is that economic policy is “driven by the ruling class.”
“It’s time to name names and defeat those people and institutions that have formed the root cause of this economic malaise,” DeSantis said. Which makes it curious that he never named Joe Biden (except one passing reference to Biden’s executive orders in a bullet point), or Chuck Schumer, or the Democratic Party.
They bear a fair share of responsibility for worsening inflation by passing the American Rescue Plan Act with zero Republican votes, adding about $2 trillion in unnecessary government spending to an already overheating economy three-quarters of a year after the pandemic recession had concluded, then mocking voters who feel its effects. As a consequence of that inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, increasing the government’s costs of borrowing beyond what’s sustainable and, more importantly to voters, more than doubling the average mortgage rate. And they would have spent trillions more if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had gone along with the Build Back Better Act. That’s in addition to Democrats’ abusing financial-regulatory authority to push green ideology, making it harder to transport cheap energy by blocking pipeline construction, and adding red tape to effective consumer products, just to name a few of their other poor economic policies.
Instead of running against Democrats, though, DeSantis is choosing to run against “them.” “The goal of our declaration of economic independence is simple: We win. They lose,” DeSantis said, copying that last part from Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War. “They” at various points in the plan means Wall Street, China, technology corporations, and “entrenched Washington politicians in both parties.”
DeSantis’s dire portrayal of American economic life is similar to Donald Trump’s “American carnage” from his inaugural address in 2017. Like DeSantis, Trump also has a hard time naming names about who is responsible for this disaster, referring to “a small group in our nation’s Capital” and “the establishment” without getting around to saying who that is.
This form of argumentation is hardly different from a conspiracy theory, and it’s more common on the political left than the right. We’re used to hearing Bernie Sanders talk about how “the billionaires” are responsible for our problems, or Elizabeth Warren decry “corporate greed” as the cause of every ill. Politicians on the left believe more government is good, so it makes more sense for them to blame some nondescript group of wealthy or powerful people that most Americans can’t relate to.
But DeSantis says he wants to scale back the federal government, and his actual policy ideas contain some helpful moves in that direction. So why the class warfare?
He claims that his state is doing well because, “in Florida, we beat the elites.” Never mind that the governor of a state definitely counts as an elite; is that really what happened in Florida? Was it class warfare and abstraction that propelled him to reelection by 20 points in 2022? Or was it his record as an effective governor who focused on education and kept taxes low and the government out of everyday life?
The portions of his remarks about China are especially demagogic. He talks about “the Chinese Communist Party that has run circles around us for a generation” and says, “We are no longer going to sell out to China at the expense of the American working family.”
The CCP is despicable, and it’s right for the U.S. to be vigilant against the threats Chinese ambition poses. It’s also true that China is in deep trouble. The Chinese central bank is cutting interest rates to stimulate a flagging economy, fiscal policy-makers are terrified of plummeting consumer spending, the real-estate sector is in the tank, manufacturing is contracting, buildings and infrastructure sit unused, and the one-child policy wrecked the country’s demographics irreversibly. The CCP makes plenty of mistakes, and its mistakes are very difficult to reverse because questioning leadership often leads to imprisonment or worse.
The rah-rah-USA-number-one take is not only more pleasing to the ear; it’s also true. But instead of making the case that China’s central planning has doomed it to failure, and American innovation and work ethic will propel us past the communists as long as we stay vigilant, DeSantis copies Biden’s attitude that China is “eating our lunch.”
On spending, DeSantis’s promise to be a “new sheriff in town” has no teeth. He has joined the bipartisan consensus that entitlements, the largest driver of federal overspending, can’t be reformed, and is therefore left arguing in favor of better managing government grants and cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” to reduce spending. By all means, cut waste, but that’s not going to solve the budgetary problems the U.S. faces, especially with higher interest rates.
DeSantis can run this strange campaign against “them,” but there are two people he actually needs to run against: Donald Trump and Joe Biden. By copying Trump’s rhetoric on the economy, he failed to present primary voters with a choice. By avoiding mentioning Biden by name, he failed to capitalize on Biden’s low popularity and partial responsibility for the economic maladies that voters are upset about. What he succeeded in doing was further normalizing demagogic class warfare on the right.
If there’s a destructive bipartisan consensus in Washington right now, it’s the belief that the American people are uniformly angry, incapable of reasoned thought, and constantly looking for politicians to tell them some shady force is making their lives miserable. It’s infantilizing, and we deserve better.
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