Proposed Republican Platforms

Chris DeMuth has one; Paul Ryan has another

In the WSJ, Christopher DeMuth writes,

The essential purpose of modern American conservatism is to conserve the American nation. My program for doing so would be in part antiprogressive. It would re-establish national borders, reduce our million annual illegal entries to zero, and calibrate lawful immigration to the needs of cultural assimilation, social harmony and economic growth. It would abolish all official racial and other group preferences, quotas and gerrymanders. It would liberate the energy sector.

My program would also address causes of national disorder in which conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defense and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting stable currency—not 5% inflation, not today’s official goal of 2% that quintuples prices in a lifetime, but zero.

And it would include not only the historical tried-and-true but also modern innovations. These include universal school choice and initiatives to mobilize science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communication and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.

DeMuth’s ideas seem to me to fall somewhere between Trumpism and the establishment. He used to head up the American Enterprise Institute.

The current AEI has issued its own platform, spearheaded by Paul Ryan. The focus is on restoring fiscal sustainability. In his introductory summary, Ryan writes,

various factors—demographics, health, inflation, and declining labor force growth and productivity—have built in an unsustainable rise in our national debt. What’s more, the federal government’s unfunded liability for our present three generations of Americans—retirees, workers, and children—falls somewhere between an estimated $100 and $200 trillion.

The federal government is making promises to its citizens that it cannot keep.

Although I agree with the goal of fiscal sustainability, I disagree with many of the particulars in the AEI program. For example, the chapter on Social Security emphasizes means-testing benefits and trying to broaden access to private tax-favored saving accounts. I would note that the failure to index the “retirement age” (I prefer to call this the “age of government dependency”) to longevity is the main reason that Social Security and Medicare are in such trouble.

Kevin Warsh has an interesting chapter on money.

Most of the United States’ existing payment systems are antiquated, slow, and expensive. US authorities have made modest improvements in recent years to Fedwire and the National Settlement Service, two systems the Fed uses to move payments between banks. But the wholesale rails that connect the central bank and the regulated banks were built using mid- to late-20th-century technology and practices. Failure to embrace new, more capable payment systems, including those based on distributed ledger technology or blockchain, leaves the US a great distance from the efficient frontier.

I do not think that blockchain is the answer. But when financial transactions are computerized, it seems anachronistic that settlement processes and money transfers are time-consuming and expensive.

Overall, Paul Ryan’s AEI document reads like a set of solutions for problems of the last decade of the 20th century. I suppose that is good, because politicians have spent the last 30 years ignoring those problems. But new problems, such as the opioid crisis and the decay of higher education, are not addressed.

And, sad to say, taking on entitlement spending is no more popular today than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago. If anything, the populist turn on the Republican side makes the prospects for reform more remote than ever.