OPINION:
Former President Donald Trump has been jetting around the country, laying out the economic vision for his second term. Plenty of professional pundits have already weighed in with talking points, but few have bothered to address how this agenda would affect the typical American family, or how this agenda parallels that of Grover Cleveland — the only president elected to non-consecutive terms.
Despite their races being 132 years apart, Mr. Trump’s and Cleveland’s economic agendas are surprisingly similar. A currency question is near the center of both campaigns. For Cleveland, the question was preserving the gold standard to prevent debasement of the dollar and runaway inflation. For Mr. Trump, the issue is arresting the current cost-of-living nightmare.
Over the last three and a half years, the dollar has lost about one-fifth of its value—a truly shocking figure. Homeownership affordability has plummeted as the monthly mortgage payment on a median price home has doubled. Groceries are 30% more expensive. Many states do not have a single major metropolitan area where housing is considered affordable.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly pointed out that inflation was not a problem during his tenure. Wages rose much faster than prices, which is why the inflation-adjusted annual incomes of American families increased thousands of dollars on average.
Just as Cleveland promised to (and succeeded in) preserving the gold standard to ensure price stability, Mr. Trump is now promising to unleash American energy production. Because energy affects the price of everything we do and everything we buy, it’s been widely demonstrated that reducing the cost of such a ubiquitous input will reduce prices throughout the economy.
Mr. Trump also wants to spend less money on foreign interventions and conflicts around the globe, a reduction in government spending which will further reduce inflationary pressures. Similarly, Cleveland bucked the trend of his own time, which had favored overseas adventurism. He preferred prioritizing America and Americans, a pseudo-America-first ideology.
Cleveland was also a strong advocate for reducing the size of government and its interference in people’s daily lives. He vetoed 584 bills in his eight years as president—more than twice the number of anyone else’s eight years in the White House.
Just as Cleveland often said he had no authority to wantonly spend the people’s money or to dictate their lives, so too has Mr. Trump pledged to conduct another round of federal deregulation if he wins election this November. As today’s bureaucracy has taken over much of Congress’s lawmaking authority, deregulation is like a second veto of modern presidents.
The parallels continue with taxes. Cleveland sought tax reform in both of his terms. Trump not only signed tax reform in his first term but is promising to go even further if elected again.
Both men have made the same case: the federal government takes too much of your money. In Cleveland’s day, essentially the only federal taxes were tariffs, so he fought to reduce them. While Mr. Trump has talked about increasing tariffs today, that is in exchange for further reductions of income taxes. Nevertheless, the campaign promise from both men is a lower overall tax burden.
Rather apropos, if Mr. Trump has a second term and then succeeds in replacing some income tax revenue with tariffs, he would be moving federal finance in the direction of where Cleveland left it—no income taxes, and only tariffs to support the government.
As Mr. Trump seeks to repeat the Cleveland miracle of non-consecutive presidential terms, he has, whether intentionally or not, adopted much of the late Democrat’s economic agenda. It speaks to how much political parties have changed in the last century that Cleveland’s platform is now at home in the Republican party.
• E.J. Antoni is a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.
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