Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, October 20, 2024

“Most of my political life has been spent in the GOP. While I’ve worked on many bipartisan projects over the years and have even advised a Democrat candidate running for president as an independent, I’d still put myself squarely in a center-right economic camp.

I got my policy chops as a member of the economics policy team of the American Enterprise Institute. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is one of my favorite books. I believe that economic freedom — by which I mean a relatively low level of regulation and taxation and sustainable budget outlook — unleashes the economy and persons to flourish and grow.

As long as I’ve been alive, the Republican Party has been the party committed to a limited government and a free economy. Voters have seen this too. For more than a decade, the GOP has consistently held an advantage for being the party entrusted with economic prosperity.

It was in this spirit that I wrote a National Affairs essay, “Beyond Growth,” during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. I wrote how the previous two years had been some of the best in memory from the standpoint of job creation, GDP growth and the stock market. I credited Trump with some of this growth, in terms of his regulatory restraint — eliminating two regulations for every new one introduced — and tax policy (although his tax cuts should have been paid for).

But the nature of my essay was to encourage Republicans (and Donald Trump) to go beyond growth. It was — and remains today — my belief that too many people have been excluded from the American economy for immigration status, low wages, criminal records that are difficult to expunge, a defunct educational system or lack of support for working parents.

I wrote about how more support should be given to our most vulnerable members of society. I very much subscribe to Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps’ philosophy, presented in his magisterial book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, that humans are at their best when they are allowed to create and innovate without unnecessary structural barriers or an oppressive government thumb pushing them down. While Democrats often get the rhetoric around an inclusive economy right, their policies don’t get there because they’re too heavy-handed.

I say this as a long-winded introduction to my readers who might still assume, as has long been the case, that the Republican Party is still the party of economic growth.

This is not the Trump economic agenda of 2024. It is nowhere close.

Nonpartisan economic estimates from Goldman Sachs to Moody’s anticipate a significant economic contraction should Trump win the presidency. For those who immediately discount this as elite liberal cahoots, these organizations projected an early economic rally in Trump’s first term.

Trump’s promises for massive tariffs on imports and mass deportations are a recipe for a weaker economy. That’s because an economy grows on labor and capital, and his agenda restricts both. His economic platform will eat away at wages and raise costs, which always tends to disproportionately impact lower-income households that don’t have economic margin to spare. Trump’s promise to protect Social Security without making necessary reforms to preserve its solvency is also a drag on growth…..”