Trump Was A Bigger Socialist In Office Than Obama-Biden-Harris
Reviewing the actual record
One of my Republican friends posts this simplistic meme to Instagram accusing Kamala Harris of a policy of socialist giveaways: “Let’s be clear: her entire plan is giving away other people’s money.”
If this friend were open to dialogue and debate, we might have a substantive discussion that obviously can’t take place on Instagram. Trump on Saturday called for an end to the independence of the Federal Reserve because it cut interest rates this week to encourage cheaper borrowing by businesses to grow the economy, which is bad news for his political campaign. He would take economic policy completely out of the hands of economists and put it in the hands of politicians like himself, to make economic decisions based not on objective analyses but on short-term political interest. He wants to unilaterally impose tariffs on a wide range of imports from a variety of countries. This would amount to a tax on consumers.
Who is the candidate who promises to give away nearly two trillion dollars in tax cuts, primarily to the rich, for the SECOND time? That would be Donald Trump. His 2017 tax cut ballooned the deficit, was skewed to the rich, and failed to deliver promised economic benefits.
As Harris noted in the debate, Penn-Wharton economists’ analysis of Trump’s policy proposals would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years. Click.
Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board takes Trump to task for “promising all sorts of costly tax giveaways that will make it hard and maybe impossible to extend the pro-growth components of his (2017) reform.” Click.
I cannot understand the screams that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “socialists” but Donald Trump is not. Trump nearly doubled the size of the deficit from when Barack Obama left office; he also grew the size of government and snatched power away from states and localities.
Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, explained to The Week that both candidates in 2020 were socialists in that they favored big government, using massive deficit spending to boost economic growth. “Neither is averse to picking economic winners and losers by helping industries they favor and crippling those they don’t via regulations and mandates.”
“Trump’s tax cuts have been accompanied by massive increases in government spending, ballooning deficits and debt and setting the stage for tax hikes on future generations (or bankruptcy, which he has openly said he’s fine courting).”
Trump even went so far as to say Republicans in Congress should outspend “heartless” Democrats. Trump also added regulations — tariffs, trade restrictions and antitrust actions against big tech companies.
He extended the long arm of big government to control the lives of ordinary people, put severe restrictions on immigration, and especially H1B visas for foreign professionals, adding gobs of red tape, which hampered business development. He forced foreign nationals to wait years if not decades to qualify for green cards, to become legal residents or citizens.
Trump “maintained a web of ethanol tariffs on foreign producers and ethanol mandates on domestic oil refiners to help red agricultural states like Iowa — even though such interventionism results in a net redistribution of wealth from consumers to producers via higher energy costs without producing notable environmental benefits.”
This does not even include the “nearly $20 billion in bailout money” to farmers to offset the cost of China’s retaliatory tariffs.
Catherine Rampall in The Washington Post pointed out: “For decades, “Iowa values” have explicitly included demands for big fat federal government subsidies for corn ethanol — among other payouts and market-distorting government interventions that Republicans might in other contexts smear as “socialist.”
In the context of Trump’s trade war with China, his Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin abandoned one of the principles of free market capitalism by instructing US manufacturing firms to reorient their supply chains and source their products elsewhere.
Trump himself lectured firms “about what products to stock,” Rampall reported. He tried “to get other countries to engage in more centralized economic planning — by, for example, demanding that European political leaders commit private companies to buy more U.S. crops and liquefied natural gas regardless of price, quality or market needs.”
Bailouts for Failing Industries
Trump and other Republicans sought to prop up failing industries like coal. He sought Soviet-style bailouts of failing coal plants. Republicans in Ohio passed a law that adds taxpayer-funded subsidies for coal-fired and nuclear power plants.
“Technological change (i.e., fracking) has made the U.S. coal industry less competitive; at least six major U.S. coal producers have filed for bankruptcy in the past year, with the most recent filing last week. But rather than letting markets run their course, Republicans at both the federal and state levels are concocting complicated handouts,” Rampall noted in 2020.
Republicans stoke fears about Democrats’ wealth redistribution schemes — robbing from the hard-working rich to subsidize the lazy poor, but top-heavy tax cuts and slashing the social safety net such as food stamps is also a way to redistribute income. (See “The Selective Socialism of Donald Trump,” by Philip Bump, Washington Post.)
Bogus Charges of Democratic Socialism Worked in Florida
Yet Trump’s charges that Biden and Harris are socialists apparently worked in 2020 with some Latino voters, especially among those of Cuban, Venezuelan and Columbian heritage in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald. Trump won Florida in 2020 by more than 300,000 votes and received a clear majority of the state’s vote.
Trump Socialism Is Popular in Key States
Paradoxically, it was Trump’s socialist policies that helped him win farm-belt states like Iowa. And it was likely the trillion-dollar stimulus, bailouts of businesses and the unemployed, and refusal to slash spending — clear violations of free market fundamentalism — that sustained his support. He actually improved his support in Iowa from 2016 to 2020, from 46 percent to 47 percent. Many analysts thought that could not be done.
Essentially, despite Republicans’ railing against socialism, if they want to win elections, they are eager to embrace certain “socialist” policies.
Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress wholeheartedly embraced the “socialism” they denounced a short time earlier, voting for the largest stimulus package in history, more than two trillion dollars, including direct-payments or “give-aways” of at least $1,200 for American adults and $500 for children in households making less than $100,000. Remarkably, when Trump was running for re-election in 2020, he called for additional trillions in stimulus, deficit be damned.
A few Republican senators expressed reservations about the stimulus package, which passed 96-0. They objected to sending about $600 more in unemployment benefits to workers that earn just minimum wages. This would somehow “incentivize people not to work.” They did not express opposition to subsiding business owners.
Senate Republicans Release Massive Economic Stimulus Bill For Coronavirus Response (Washington Post, 3/19/20). Trump and the Republicans even supported the government taking equity stakes in large and small businesses that receive bailouts, with restrictions on the salaries of CEOs, who wouldn’t be able to receive more than $425,000 annually. If that’s not socialism, what is?
Conservatives gutted the social safety net. Then in a crisis, they embraced it (3/25/2020).
Death of Fiscal Conservatism
And not a word of concern was spoken about skyrocketing government debt among Republican lawmakers or President Trump, though they railed constantly about the deficit when Barack Obama was president.
This “marks a sea change on the political right. The president and many of his conservative allies rose to power on the strength of a grass-roots movement forged in opposition to the bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis and President Obama’s subsequent economic stimulus package,” The Post reported in 2020. “…On the right, the tea party movement formed preaching austerity and prioritizing the ballooning federal debt. The tea party powered the Republican wave election in 2010…”
ABC News: “In many cases, the conservatives who backed the $2 trillion bill — the largest economic relief measure in U.S. history — were the very same who raged against the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package backed by the Obama administration…Leading budget hawk Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who insisted in 2009 that government cannot spend its way out of a recession, this week joined a unanimous Senate majority that approved what he described as “the biggest government intervention in the economy in the history of the world…This is a response to an invasion. This is the kind of thing you’d have to do if we were at war.”
Failing to take dramatic action now, Toomey said, “would be a wildly imprudent thing, and it would probably result in such a severe recession — it might very well be a depression — and it could take decades to come out of this.”
…Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s outgoing chief of staff and a former Republican congressman aligned with the tea party, told a private audience last month that the GOP only worries about deficits “when there is a Democrat in the White House,” according to a report in The Washington Post.
In other words, to paraphrase an old joke about prostitution, “We’ve already established what you are (a hypocrite and a socialist). All we’re doing is bargaining about price.”
Related:
Trump Socialism, and Politically Conservative Women, Helped Win Iowa for GOP in 2020.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “When Republicans warn of socialism today, they are not talking about real socialism, but rather about a peculiarly American adaptation of the term. True socialism is an economic system in which the means of production, that is, the factories and industries, are owned by the people. In practical terms, that means they are owned by the government. And this is where socialism bleeds into communism, which is the political system designed to put socialism into practice. True socialism has never been popular in America…(When Republicans today talk about socialism) is nothing of the sort; it is actually regulated capitalism.”
Trump is better at name calling than effective policy making. He picks words to trigger fears rather than planning for our future.