Donald Trump’s speech at the New York Economic Club on Thursday was quite brilliant, powerfully delivered and even laced with the kind of soaring “capitalist prosperity” rhetoric that has not been heard from GOP politicians since Jack Kemp.
I was all set to say as much this morning at 7AM on CNN’s “New Day” show. But the segment host, Alisyn Camerota, averred that first there was some more important business pending. That is, what did I think about Donald Trump’s “birther” views, and wasn’t that just as important as his economic speech?
That’s right. We have an economy that is on death’s door after 30-years of economic mis-governance by the Wall Street/Washington elites, but cable news was obsessed by the possibility that the Donald’s uuge comb-over might be hiding a tin foil hat!
So I thought it pertinent to observe that Barack Obama was born somewhere, had been elected President, served eight years and was on the way out—-but that he had left behind an even bigger economic mess than he inherited. In fact, the millions of families in Flyover America who have lost good jobs or seen their wages eroded by inflation or have had their savings crushed on the Fed’s zero bound do not care a whit about where our 44th President was born, but they most surely are interested in what is going to be done to change the current ruinous regime.
At length, we did get to Trump’s economic plan which among other things proposes to cut Federal taxes by $4.4 trillion over the next 10 years. I am more than ok with that because it at least recognizes the supply side principle that capitalist prosperity cannot be revived without lessening the heavy-hand of the state on incentives for work and enterprise in the private economy.
Besides, by the lights of CBO’s so-called “baseline” projections, Federal revenues under current policy would total $42 trillion over the next decade. So that means Trump’s tax cut is not all that radical, and at approximately 10% of the existing base is actually far smaller than the 25% revenue reduction embedded in the 1981 Reagan tax cut.
But what is profoundly disappointing about the Trump campaign’s stab at a semi-coherent economic plan is that it is a dog’s breakfast of some plausible policy ideas, really bad fiscal math and a relapse to the discredited, 35 year-old dogma of sweeping income tax cuts which pay for themselves.
