Christopher Buskirk opines in WaPo that the great conservative experiment is doing just fine, but the problem is he’s a very shallow observer:
Against this butcher’s bill of failures and broken promises, look at Trump’s first year in office: Unemployment is low, the stock market is high and wages are rising. Ordinary Americans have more money in their pockets as a result of lower taxes. Illegal immigration has declined, regulations are being rolled back, Obamacare’s individual mandate is dead, and a slate of constitutionalist judges has been approved, with more on the way. Thanks to a too-timid congressional leadership, deficits remain a problem, but we’ve at least gotten major pro-growth policies. And with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s impending departure, we have a chance at a more energetic effective leadership team.
He’s railing against the Republicans of the early 2000s and those who served during Obama’s Administration, which isn’t a bad idea, but the problem is that he, like the man himself, wants to give Trump far too much credit. Let’s go through a few:
- Unemployment and the stock market may be low and the stock market high, but they are practically unchanged since the end of the Obama Administration.
- Wages may or may not be rising, but Trump has little control over that – that comes down to profitability and scarcity of talent. On a larger scale, Trump has done remarkably little on the economic front.
- Lower taxes for the wealthy. But this is an assertion shorn of context. What will the effect be on the nation, particularly in the area of corporate taxes? So far, informed critics have pointed out that the lower taxes are only resulting in more money for those who have it through stock buybacks and the like. Investment in new production? Isn’t happening. Buskirk sounds dangerously like former Governor Brownback of Kansas, whose guesses on how economics work did not pan out.
- Immigration has been declining for nearly a decade, mostly under the center-left leadership of Obama, although I’d argue there’s more to it than Obama – there’s a xenophobic nation which no longer welcomes immigrants. Taking credit for a long-term trend is a pothole waiting to break your ankle.
- The individual mandate may be dead, but why take that as a positive? The healthier the citizenry, the more productive it’ll be. The individual mandate was a plug for the individual, for industry, and for the nation. Without it, growth will suffer.
- The “constitutionalist judges” appear, by and large, to be fairly inferior. Some have even been rejected by a GOP that has been largely compliant to Trump’s judiciary selections, indicating these aren’t so much Constitutionalists as just big mouths that caught Trump’s attention.
I wouldn’t pay too much attention to his argument. He seems to be caught up in the standard right wing fantasy of how things work – even when they don’t.
He doesn’t pass the smell test.
