What Speaker Ryan
said on 60 Minutes last weekend about letting “bygones be bygones” with
President-Elect Trump may only be partly true. There are certainly
contradictions within the Republican party as a whole. But as between these two
individuals, both ready to wield powers granted by the Constitution, the proper
word would be “confrontation,” not dialectical “contradiction.”
How so? It has to
do with their alignments to differing factions in the party. Speaker Ryan is a
fiscal conservative. For example, he is planning to reduce the government’s
share of the cost of Medicare. Democrats say he wants to “privatize” it, making
it a system of health care premium supports or vouchers, rather than an
entitlement to government funding. In this equation, the amount the government would
save is about exactly equal to the extra amount seniors would have to cover out
of their own pockets. But maybe that can be considered “responsible.”
The one thing
fiscal conservatives hate worse than entitlements they can’t get rid of is
government debt they can’t get rid of. That is, they hate “borrow and spend”
and didn’t care for it much even when all
the governments of the Western economies were doing it in order to get out of
the Great Recession.
Well, on second
thought, there’s one thing they hate worse still: “tax and spend.” But Trump
isn’t going to do that. He’s going to reduce taxes.
And build
infrastructure. And make the military “great” again. But how’s he going to pay
for it? If not tax and spend….
He has to borrow
and spend, doesn’t he? What fiscal conservatives hate but blue collar workers
might love. Trump’s no social conservative, but enough social conservatives
sucked it up, voted for him, and got him elected anyway – with the help of
Trump’s new, blue collar Republicans.
But is he a
fiscal conservative? That’s in doubt, because if Trump wants to spend but not
tax, he’ll have to borrow. Moreover, he promised on the campaign trail that he
would not “touch” entitlements. Today, with the party ready to take firm
control, it may look to some like everything can be smoothed over and worked
out. But when push comes to shove (and I say this as a judgment of
personalities not as a conclusion of dialectical logic), there will be some
pushing and shoving. And the Democrats won’t just be standing around watching.
Originally posted in Economic Populist, A Community Site for Economics Freaks and Geeks, on December 7, 2016.
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