OPINION:
The nation’s elites have failed ordinary Americans with high inflation and stagnant incomes.
Extreme climate solutions and enforced cultural correctness — imposed through uncompromising industrial policies and ineffective border enforcement — are eroding prosperity and community resources.
Voters are seizing on former President Donald Trump as their tribune. This ballot-box rebellion is not unique to our country or our times.
Voters in Iran, India and European Union nations have lodged chilling protests against governments that claimed high moral or intellectual authority to impose some combination of radically altered societies, market reforms or illusions of national grandeur.
Iranians have elected a new president who, in contradiction to the theocratic authority of the ayatollahs, advocates a conciliatory posture toward the West to perhaps ease the grip of economic sanctions.
In the Netherlands, populists have scored big victories in parliamentary elections. In France, the hard right and left have won enough seats to create a hung Parliament.
Grand designs such as the EU’s climate action plans and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal don’t deliver decent lives to most ordinary people.
Hauts-de-France, a once prosperous steel and mining region, has France’s highest unemployment rate. With EU funding, the local government is engineering a new battery industry. But that will require 12,000 new housing units, because too few of the jobs created are going to local residents. That creates fertile ground for President Emmanuel Macron’s populist opponents.
In the Netherlands, government programs to shut down dairy farmers — cows emit too much nitrogen — helped vault populists into the newly formed government.
India boasts 8% growth in its gross domestic product, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-business reforms have mostly benefited high-tech and manufacturing companies in the south. In the north, Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and a bastion of Mr. Modi’s electoral strength in 2019, swung to his opposition this year.
In America, many people don’t have the skills to get jobs at President Biden’s semiconductor, battery and other green industry factories. And consider that millions struggle to pay high grocery prices thanks to the deficit spending necessary to finance the CHIPS and Science Act’s and Inflation Reduction Act’s industrial policies.
Add to those woes, huge waves of illegal immigration and progressive prosecutors who equate law enforcement with racism, and you get fears of diluted opportunity and crime — and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump is not a threat to democracy. Rather, it’s what democracy delivers when elites treat those disappointed with their policies as morally debased and create a cancel culture to impoverish their critics.
At least Mr. Trump is no more of a threat than Mr. Biden, who, dissatisfied with recent Supreme Court decisions, advocates altering its composition.
A court system that allows a local prosecutor to campaign on throwing a former president in jail and tries him for a federal offense in a state court does need its wings clipped.
We have seen this before with the ascent of Presidents Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
What disturbs me is the lack of understanding of basic economic issues so displayed by Mr. Trump.
With the federal deficit at 7% of GDP, the country simply can’t afford to extend the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. If we want child and child care tax credits, the Affordable Care Act and older Americans not driven to poverty, then Americans need to pay more in taxes.
Have you ever heard that from Mr. Trump’s brain trust?
We can’t afford our alarming level of dependence on Chinese imports, and a 60% tariff might not damage the economy in the long term if the proceeds are returned to consumers via income tax cuts.
What will damage prosperity is declaring a trade war on the whole world.
In the last year, big companies such as Microsoft have investment $357 billion in artificial intelligence. That would not have been possible without the huge profits their other franchises generate selling not just in the United States but around the world.
Yet Mr. Trump appears to believe he can threaten free trade partners and other allies with an across-the-board tariff, perhaps to finance tax cuts, without seeing foreign markets closed to our high-tech exports.
Similarly, the recent pace of employment and economic growth would simply not be possible with the approximately 80,000 to 100,000 new workers provided monthly by indigenous population growth and legal immigration. Illegal arrivals likely fill about half the new jobs.
If Mr. Trump is going to deport them all and seal the border, he should offer a plan for more orderly legal immigration in line with the need to expand the economy fast enough to pay our debts.
His policies won’t deliver the prosperity he promises any more than arduous training would enable me to play shortstop for the New York Yankees.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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