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发帖数: 6571 | 1 The Late, Great Democratic Party
By Stephen Moore
Wednesday, 27 Jul 2016 07:20 AM
This week, the Democrats officially appoint the battered Hillary Clinton to
be torchbearer of the party. She has slouched to the finish line. She is
tired and the country is tired of her.
Sorry, Democrats, no do-overs. You're stuck with her.
But it isn't just Clinton who is out of touch and in tragic decline. It's
the whole Democratic Party. My friends at the American Enterprise Institute
reported last week that the Democratic platform is silent on economic growth
. Maybe that is because across the country during the past eight years of
Obamanomics, economic growth has been silent.
This is an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. We have had 2
percent growth under Obama, but that's an economy treading water. It's
sister-kissing growth that, yes, has thankfully kept us out of recession,
but doesn't lead to much, if any, rise in living standards.
Just as Obama refuses to utter the words "Islamic terrorism," now the whole
party can't seem to bring itself to endorse "economic growth."
For the left, growth isn't really the goal. They want redistribution of
wealth.
The language of a party platform doesn't matter much, if at all. But if you'
re not for growth, you probably aren't going to produce it, just as if you'
re not even trying to get in shape, it's a good bet you're not going to shed
those extra 16 pounds.
Amazingly, the last great growth hawk of the Democratic Party of modern
times, John F. Kennedy, ran against Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 on the
issue of the "growth deficit." The economy in the 1950s was fairly
prosperous, much more so than over the last eight years. But JFK said we can
"do bettah" and convinced Americans we could see much faster wage gains
with greater opportunities.
Through tax cuts and free trade, the JFK era sparked growth rates of 4, 5
and even 6 percent in the go-go '60s until LBJ crashed the economy with New
Deal welfare statism.
Now we have this weird austerity-worship that has taken over the party. The
rich and businesses are portrayed as scalpers and scoundrels. And employers
are exploiters in the "you didn't build that" mindset. Radical
environmentalists, a bedrock of the party, are anti-growth and believe that
when people get richer, it's worse for the planet. (They should go live in
India or Mexico City and see how well the environment is doing there.) They
ridicule what they call "growth-mania" on the right. Human economic activity
, they warn, is causing catastrophic global warming.
Perhaps this explains the litany of economic failures during the Obama years
. We have had $8 trillion of new debt; minimum-wage increases; Obamacare; an
$800 billion stimulus plan (with "shovel-ready" projects); tax increases on
the rich; more than $100 billion in green energy subsidies; auto company
and union pension bailouts; re-regulation of the financial industry and
banks; and a Federal Reserve that has manufactured near zero short-term
interest rates for seven years with up to $4 trillion of bond acquisitions.
?All of these were designed primarily to redistribute income, so is it a
shock that they haven't produced growth?
Poor Hillary Clinton has the unenviable task of persuading Americans to open
up wide and swallow four more years of this swill.
Here's a question that Donald Trump and Mike Pence should be asking every
day: What would Clinton offer that is any different? She is promising
minimum-wage increases, tax hikes on the rich and more infrastructure
spending. This is new? This is change?
The left's defense of growth anemia is that 2 percent growth is the new
normal, so get used to it. Obama's first economic guru, Larry Summers, calls
this secular stagnation that is here to stay. This past week at a Politico
economic forum I made the claim that we could have 4 percent growth easily,
and the jaws of the media dropped in collective disbelief, as if I suggested
that we could suspend the laws of gravity.
Actually, 4 percent growth isn't that hard to achieve. A pro-America energy
production policy, including putting coal back in business, could produce $
150 billion more output each year. Another percentage ?point of growth could
come from tax reform with reductions in business taxes to spur investment
and hiring, according to the folks at the Tax Foundation.
But Democrats will never get us there, because they aren't even trying. They
will celebrate 2 percent growth — the weakest recovery in half a century
— as a glittering achievement.
The party that once stood with the working class now says Americans have to
work more and settle for less. ? That's not just wrong; it's sad.
http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/StreetTalk/democrat-party-growth-deficit/2016/07/26/id/740555/ |
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