IN recent days, I have had a dream: that America has a real Republican Party, a party offering a serious right-of-centre alternative to the Democrats. Such a contest of ideas would improve the public debate and offer Americans a real choice, not the cartoon campaign we have today.
Donald Trump had the opportunity to reset his campaign this week and managed to derail it. But, forget the detour for a moment. Trump’s much-heralded speech laying out his economic policies was a mishmash of populism, hypocrisy and pandering.
It promised protectionism, trade wars and tax cuts for the rich and proposed no changes to America’s fast-growing entitlement programmes. It was ideologically incoherent and fiscally irresponsible.
When did this Republican intellectual decay begin? According to the conservative writer David Frum in his brilliant book, Dead Right, it started in the Reagan years. Historically, the Republican Party was all about fiscal discipline. Reagan had viciously attacked (Democrat president) Jimmy Carter for racking up deficits and debt. In fact, by the end of Reagan’s two terms, the national debt had tripled.
Republicans came to recognise that, whatever it might say, the public in fact didn’t want cuts in government programmes. The country was, in (columnist) George Will’s phrase, “ideologically conservative but operationally liberal”. This was the Republicans’ moment of truth, Frum argued, and they blinked.
Since then, most Republican presidential candidates have promised the public huge tax cuts without any real spending restraint to pay for them. The result, of course, has been massive deficits.
The only Republican who tried to adhere to some notion of fiscal conservatism, George H.W. Bush, was attacked and destroyed for this sin by conservatives led by Newt Gingrich.
Republican economic plans nowadays are simply not serious. In the primaries, the three main candidates of “the party of fiscal discipline” — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump — presented plans that added US$8 trillion (RM32 trillion), US$10 trillion (RM40 trillion) or US$11 trillion (RM44 trillion) in debt over the next decade (according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center).
Even the much-respected (Speaker of the US House of Representatives) Paul Ryan proposed a plan with a US$2.4 trillion hole in it.
These vast gaps are papered over with magical assumptions of higher growth and the usual vague calls to end waste, fraud and abuse. (Whether you like or dislike Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s economic plan, its numbers add up.)
Trump’s plans are a replay of these dishonest techniques. He proposes large tax cuts, but of course doesn’t pay for them, assuming the usual bogus growth numbers to make them look better on paper. He promises to cut regulations, saying at a rally this week that he might reduce them by 70 or 75 per cent, which is so absurd that I don’t think even he believes it. His added twist is protectionism, but even here the technique is the same. He makes wild promises that he would never be able to fulfil.
Imagine, instead of all this, a Republican Party that believed firmly in limited government — and proposed policies that were true to these beliefs. It could present a serious plan that rationalised America’s unwieldy and corrupt tax code, simplifying the structure, even cutting rates — but only to the extent these were actually paid for by increased revenues from closing loopholes, deductions and credits.
Imagine a Republican Party that focused less on tax cuts for the rich and more on improved access to the market for the poor and middle class. For example, a party that proposed not to eliminate Obamacare but to reform it using stronger market mechanisms, allowing greater competition and transparency in prices and services.
Imagine a party that presented specific plans to cut regulations that hamper the formation and growth of small businesses and encouraged large companies to hire more workers and make new investments (rather than engaging in financial engineering and stock buybacks).
A party that encouraged states to get rid of the ever-expanding licensing requirements put into place to keep out the competition. (In the 1950s, less than five per cent of jobs required a licence to do the work. Today 29 per cent do, at a cost of nearly three million jobs, according to University of Minnesota professor Morris Kleiner, who has studied the topic extensively. As the Kauffman Foundation has discovered in surveying small businesses, they care far more about too many regulations than they do about their tax rates.
Political systems need debate and choices. But for these to be useful, both sides have to accept certain informal rules — that their proposals will be serious and coherent and that their numbers will add up. America would benefit greatly if the Republican Party were to focus on its core ideas, and be a substantive, market-oriented, right-of-centre party.
For now, it remains a dream.
The write is an American journalist and author. He is the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly column for ‘The Washington Post’