The GOP Establishment Deserves Trump
In the improbable candidacy of Donald Trump, the Republican Party got what it deserved. After all, its job in the context of American political democracy is to function as the nation’s fiscal guardian.
Yet that role hardly fits the GOP’s new presidential nominee and former constructor of hotels and casinos who now promises to build the greatest-ever walls, roads, bridges, military and other symbols of national greatness.
But then again, the GOP has been derelict on the fiscal front for most of the last for 35 years. Instead, it has become a gang of neocons, social cons, tax cons and just cons. Perhaps Trump is merely the ultimate expression of the latter.
The first two of these contemporary GOP factions — the neocons and the social cons — aggrandize the size and role of the state. This extends from the uninvited policing of the world’s neighborhoods and nations to the unjust intrusions into domestic family, religious and social life.
The “tax cons” correctly recognize that private enterprise, not the state, generates prosperity. They recognize that tax barriers and disincentives to production, investment and work should be lowered whenever possible. But they fail to heed the great Dwight D. Eisenhower’s fundamental rule for fiscal governance now that the cat of Big Government is out of the bag.
Namely, that tax cuts must be earned with offsetting cuts in spending and entitlements.
That’s how Ike balanced the budget several times during his eight-year tenure, even as he struggled to reduce the military budget by 33% in real terms. He also chiseled away at the economically stifling legacy of the Roosevelt/Truman war taxes.
The GOP’s latter-day supply siders, unfortunately, did the opposite — especially during the era of Republican rule under George “Dubya” Bush. The “tax cons” joined hands with the neocons to protect and enlarge the Reagan Warfare State budget, expanding its present-day purchasing power to more than twice what Gen. Eisenhower thought was adequate at the very peak of the Cold War. At the same time, they slashed the revenue base by nearly 4% of GDP with two giant, unearned tax cuts.
And so they replicated the fiscal betrayal of the Reagan years with even less justification. Indeed, rather than pretending as did “the Gipper” that deficits would eventually go away owing to “growth,” the tax cons of the Dick Cheney variety militantly proclaimed deficits didn’t even matter.
In this context, the balance of rank-and-file congressional Republicans morphed into “just cons.”
That is, they settled into the business of harvesting campaign loot from the K Street lobbies and the endless racketeering enterprises of the Imperial City.
And especially after the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates, the congressional GOP became a pure fundraising machine that happened to dispense talking points favored by the neocons, social cons and tax cons — when convenient.
Like I said, the GOP establishment deserves Trump.
Below, Gerald Celente details the political and media establishments’ war against Trump… and why they haven’t been able to stop him. Read on.
Best,
David Stockman
for The Daily Reckoning
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