Donald J. Trump giving his acceptance speech for the GOP presidential nomination on July 21, 2016
Image Credit: YouTube/ABC 15 Arizona

Listening to Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night, most of the time I found myself profoundly in agreement with him. Yet I still hesitate to support or to say I will vote for him, because of some of his positions on the economy, plus some of his foreign policy proclivities. I am still the despairing guy who wrote The Anguish of a Conservative Voter. In addition there is his bombastic style that seems to alienate as many people as it attracts. In the words of Kurt Schlichter in a Townhall.com post,

Donald Trump is a vulgar clown posing as a conservative, unmoored to any coherent ideology. He has generated unprecedented opposition and the contempt of people across the political spectrum. He is unbound to any principle other than his own appetite for adulation.

Yet, despite these Trump drawbacks, Schlichter goes on to write:

And those very factors that make him so appalling also make him America’s only hope. Now we need to suck it up and pull the lever for this jerk.

I am beginning to fear Schlicter has the right of it, although I would not say Trump’s appalling characteristics create the necessity of voting for him. The prospect that this country and the GOP could not do any better makes me very sad.

If we were not in an era of radical and far-reaching danger,  I would reject Trump out of hand as a candidate who promised his own catastrophes. Yet today we are facing existential dangers from Islamic jihadist movements, and from Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia attempting to claw back Russia’s lost territories of Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea states. In addition our economy has entered, in the phrase of the Keynesians, into a secular stagnation. We may be within a decade of having slow growth and exponentially growing public debt combine to bankrupt the federal government. By this I mean the combination of paying the interest on the national debt and paying for entitlements will absorb every single penny of government revenues. In a time of severe foreign threats, such a situation could prove fatal.

Our very real problem is that as bad as Trump is, he is considerably better than Hillary Clinton in his economic positions.

For the record, in case you have not seen Trump’s speech, a video of his full acceptance speech is shown below.

Trump’s Economic Positions

Some of Trump’s economic positions are truly admirable and necessary for future economic growth. Predominant in my mind are what Trump says he will do about taxes. As Trump noted in his speech, the United States is one of the most highly taxed countries in the world, particularly with corporate taxes. If you count corporate taxes at all government levels — local, state, and federal — the federal government has the highest corporate taxes in the world, with the exception of Chad and the United Arab Emirates.

Assuming Trump does not change his mind again in the near future (which is sometimes a vain hope), we can look for a Trump tax policy that would look much like House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan, according to Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore. While not being an actual flat tax, individual income tax brackets would be reduced from seven tax brackets to three, with the top income tax bracket fixed at 33 percent as opposed to the current 39.6 percent. The lowest tax bracket would be either zero or 12 percent, depending on the combination of the standard deduction with personal exemptions. The intermediate tax bracket would be at 25 percent. The corporate tax rate would be reduced to 20 percent from its current level of 35 percent, making U.S. corporate taxes competitive with Europe’s. The House GOP plan would also abolish the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax.

Nevertheless, if Trump does not at the same time cut federal expenditures, he will not come close to ameliorating our economic problems. One of our most basic problems is that the federal government is allocating all too much of the country’s capital assets. Cutting corporate taxes will incentivize companies to invest in new productive capacity oriented toward actual private-sector demand; cutting individual taxes will release assets formerly allocated by government to be allocated by individual consumer demand. However, if government does not at the same time reduce its expenditures by a similar amount that it cuts in taxes, only a portion of the tax cuts will end up as a reallocation of capital. Most of the difference would probably express itself as a combination of continuing government capital allocation and inflation. Although cutting expenditures would be very painful, given the long time we have avoided addressing the problem, it is still quite possible.

Yet, Trump has also pledged to leave entitlements — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and few other programs — alone. In fiscal year 2015, the entitlements accounted for about two-thirds of the federal budget, with defense and international security assistance being only about 16% of the budget. Not only that but entitlement spending is rapidly increasing while defense budgets are decreasing. If Trump is not willing to cut the largest and fastest growing piece of the budget, then he has no hope to decrease overall federal expenditures. This is one of the most disastrous aspects of Trump’s proposed economic policy. One can only hope House Speaker Paul Ryan and a GOP congress can ride herd on a President Trump, and save him from his own worst impulses. After all, if Trump is going to accomplish anything, he must do it with the cooperation of the U.S. Congress.

Also as Trump noted in his speech, costly economic regulations are costing the U.S. as much as $2 trillion a year, approximately 11 percent of GDP. In particular, Trump says he wants to end much of the regulation on energy production. One of his proposals that delighted me was his pledge to “repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again!”

On the other hand, he also repeated his ill-considered attack on free trade agreements, claiming that they do not serve American interests because they cause an export of jobs to foreign countries. I will not repeat my arguments that any free trade between an American businessman and a foreign supplier that is freely taken by both is of benefit to both nations. if you are unfamiliar with this argument, you can find it in the posts Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Globalization, Xenophobia, and Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that long-lasting costs in the jobs of workers displaced by foreign trade can only occur when government regulation of markets keeps markets from readjusting to the trade substitution. Free-markets would cause capital saved by not producing the substituted good domestically, including human labor, to be invested in producing other products. In any foreign trade there will be at least a short-term cost in the jobs of workers who used to produce the  good domestically. if this is not acceptable, then absolutely no foreign trade at all would be acceptable. Trump and other opponents of foreign trade would serve the country much better by criticizing government barriers to the reallocation of capital saved by that trade. Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton (admittedly under the leftwards pressure of Bernie Sanders) appears to be just as much in error as Donald Trump.

The Problems of the Supreme Court and Law and Order

One of the most important parts of Trump’s speech was where he pledged to appoint new justices of the Supreme Court who would have  “similar views, principles, and judicial philosophies” of “our beloved Justice Scalia.” With the Supreme Court drifting toward the Left, it would be catastrophic for a President Hillary Clinton to appoint more leftist justices, who would then effectively amend the constitution from the bench by reinterpreting it. This has been a long-time progressive project, since it is much easier to reinterpret the Constitution favorable to leftist designs than to go through the arduous procedures to formally amend it. This might well be the single most weighty argument to vote for Trump.

Trump is also pledging to be a “law and order” candidate, and to reverse the racial division caused by the President. “The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen. … This administration has failed America’s inner cities.” In particular the President has failed them by inadvertently encouraging the recent assassinations of police. Trump has promised to respond by appointing the best prosecutors “to get the job done” in fighting crime. One might question how, beyond halting the loose rhetoric of President Obama, he can do this, since the enforcement of law and order is primarily a local government function. Citizens everywhere, and conservatives in particular, should shudder at the thought of the federal government unconstitutionally taking over this responsibility.

And of course Trump repeated his pledge to build a wall on our border with Mexico to stop the flow of illegal drugs, of illegal immigrants, and of possible jihadi agents blending in with the immigrants. This pledge strikes a responsive and agreeable chord with just about any conservative.

What Will Trump Do in Foreign Policy?

Under the military pressure of ISIS, Russia, China, and Iran, Trump would “rebuild our depleted military.” Trump says we must build the best intelligence possible, and to abandon the policies of regime change and nation building, which I thought to be an interesting echo of Obama. He also pledges to destroy ISIS and Islamic terrorism, and to do it fast! So-far, so-good. However, he also said that NATO was obsolete since it had no provisions for cooperation against jihadi terrorism. He also seemed to imply that if our NATO allies did not meet their “fair-share” of defense expenditures, we might walk away from it. This must have been music in Vladimir Putin’s ears. It is hard to see how abandonment of NATO could serve our security interests.

The Alternatives

The possible alternatives for a principled conservative voter remain the same as the ones I listed in The Anguish of a Conservative Voter. You can:

1. Hold your nose and vote for the man;
2. Vote for no one; or
3. If there is a third-party candidate, vote for him/her.

I do not include voting for Hillary, since voting for that unprincipled law-breaker, who wants to centralize even more economic power in the government, would be much worse than voting for Trump. In addition, voting for no one seems too much of a cop-out to be an acceptable option. There would have to be no alternative candidate even a little more acceptable than Trump to take that option. Also, as many have pointed out, voting for an alternative candidate, although an expression of conscience, would also make the election of Hillary Clinton more likely.

For these reasons I think I just might hold my nose and vote for the jerk, just as Kurt Schlichter urged. The appointment of acceptable Supreme Court justices, the economic improvements we could get from tax and regulation reforms, and an all out fight against jihadi enemies are my reasons for this inclination. Also, we can hope that Paul Ryan and a GOP Congress would keep Trump from realizing his worst instincts.  However, if Donald J. Trump gives me even more reason to dislike him, I will probably vote for the Libertarian Party candidate.

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