President-Elect Donald Trump conversing with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, November 10, 2016
Wikimedia Commons / Pete Souza

The shell-shocked mass media  and progressive pundits still are having immense difficulty coming to terms with the insult to their all-knowing wisdom of Donald Trump’s election. That insult will become all the greater as policies launched by the Grand Old Party actually work and return Americans to prosperity.

The Promise of Making America Great Again

You might consider my last sentence to be more than a little incautious, given all that we have gone through over the past decade or so. After all, GDP growth has been steadily declining since roughly 1966, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. If you were to calculate a moving time-average of GDP over ten-year periods, you would get the plot below produced by the Gallup Organization. By averaging over ten-year periods you average over the short-term fluctuations of recessions and booms to reveal the very long-term trends of economic growth.

Over time our capacity to produce long-term economic growth has steadily decayed from around three percent in 1966 to around one percent today, a decrease of about 0.4 percent per decade. (Our current annual growth rate of around two percent appears to be a departure from the mean.) There have been some exceptions to this constant fall. Interpolating with your eye from roughly a third of the way from 1966 to 2016 up to the steep decline caused by the 2007-2009 “Great Recession”, you can see the periods of healthy growth during the Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. Alas, the Obama administration has returned us to our long-term decline.

What has caused our economic corruption? In a nutshell, it was the dirigiste state, in which it was generally assumed government had to supervise and manage the economy to keep it healthy. In fact the opposite has been the case, as we can see in the cases of almost all Western economies and of Japan. The Gallup report from which the plot above was taken, No Recovery: An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline written by Gallup Senior Economist Jonathon Rothwell, focuses in particular on the effects of government economic regulations, particularly on the three sectors of health care, housing, and education. However, the rot goes far beyond that.

One of our biggest problems is the fraction of GDP the government gets to allocate for its purposes, denying those resources for the needs of the real creators of wealth, America’s businesses. Keynesians would claim it does not matter, so long as economic demand is maintained. Neoclassical economists would beg to differ, as it  matters a lot just what is being demanded. Some outputs are of more use in maintaining economic growth than others, and historically the U.S. government has been a very poor investor. If one includes the expenditures of U.S. governments at all levels (local, state, and federal), total government expenditures for 2016 are about $6.30 trillion, or 33.8 percent of an $18.66 trillion GDP according to Federal Reserve data. Total federal government expenditures are $4.26 trillion, or 22.8 percent of GDP. To turn our economic fortunes around, we need not only to greatly prune economic regulations, but also we need to reduce both government expenditures and taxes. Both reductions are needed to transfer more economic assets to the control of companies while taking them away from the government.

To redeem his promise to make America great again, Trump must also make us more secure and feared by our enemies to deter aggression from Russia, China, and Iran, not to mention protecting us from ISIS. This will require a much more assertive foreign policy backed up by a much stronger U.S. military and navy. Because of the threat of nuclear weapons delivered by missiles, renewed attention should be given to ballistic missile defenses. See the posts American Anti-Missile Defense, The Menace of Hypersonic Glide Vehicles, Defenses Against Hypersonic Glide Vehicles, and More on HGV Defenses. All of this will require extensive increases in expenditures, the exact opposite direction from where we need to go to reduce government’s impact on the economy. To whatever degree defense expenditures are increased, other federal spending must come down by even more.

The Promise of Trump’s Cabinet

The caliber of Trump’s appointees  is going a long way toward easing conservatives’ concerns that Trump himself was a closet progressive. Probably at no time in living memory have we seen a cabinet more dedicated to neoliberal (read conservative) principles than the one Trump has appointed. Here are the people he has picked so far:

• Secretary of State: Rex Tillerson
• Secretary of the Treasury: Steve Mnuchin
• Secretary of Defense: Gen. James Mattis
• Attorney General : Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
• Homeland Security: Gen. John Kelly
• Department of Energy: Rick Perry
• Department of Labor: Andrew Puzder
• Environmental Protection Agency: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt
• Department of Education: Betsy DeVos
• Department of Health and Human Services: Rep. Tom Price (R-GA)
• Department of Transportation: Elaine Chao
• Department of Housing and Urban Development: Dr. Ben Carson
• Department of Commerce: Wilbur Ross
• Director of the CIA: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KA)
• Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus
• Chief Strategist: Steve Bannon
• White House National Security Advisor: Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn
• Deputy National Security Advisor: K.T. McFarland
• Ambassador to the United Nations: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley

Besides how conservative all these picks are, there are at least three other attributes that make them notable. First, everyone of them is an accomplished doer who knows how to get things done. Notice that all of the appointments having to do with national security, defense, and intelligence are general officers, with the exception of the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Even that lone exception tells us a lot, since Tillerson as the CEO of Exxon Mobil, the world’s sixth largest company by revenue, has had a great deal of experience negotiating  with foreign governments on behalf of his company. These are all people who can be expected to “kick ass and take names”, as the saying goes, to get things done.

A second attribute  that is widely remarked upon is how skeptical many of them are of their department’s past policies. In particular, Jeff Sessions, John Kelley, Rick Perry, Andrew Puzder, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, Ben Carson, and Mike Pompeo, can all be so characterized. Scott Pruitt, the nominee to head the EPA, and Rick Perry, nominated to head the Department of Energy, openly disbelieve  Anthropogenic (i.e. man-caused) global warming (AGW), positions the exact opposite of what those agencies hold now. See my posts Solar Wind, Cosmic Rays and Clouds: The Determinants of Global Warming and Global Warming Teaches Humility for more on this important subject. In addition, Betsy DeVos, who will head the Department of Education, has championed school vouchers and charter schools, hardly the Education Department’s preferred position.

Finally, as you would expect from presidential cabinet nominees, each and every one is very knowledgable and ready to hit the ground running, with the possible exception of Nikki Haley as American ambassador to the UN. I expect to hear great wailing and gnashing of teeth from most of the departments after inauguration day.

The GOP’s Better Way

Reservations I have always had of Donald Trump have been a seeming lack of knowledge about the world and a severely underdeveloped personal ideology. Such weaknesses would seem to be fatal for any president. However, what he has said since the election and the quality of the people he has nominated both seem to indicate he is a quick learner, and that he has been listening very intently to the people he was interviewing. In addition and just as importantly, he has been listening to Republican congressional leaders, particularly to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Much (although not all) of what Trump has campaigned about finds its echo in detailed legislative plans worked out by House leaders in consultation with their constituents. Trump therefore does not have to look far to find detailed ways to fulfill his promises. Collectively called “the GOP’s Better Way” by Ryan and his colleagues, they constitute a complete map to find our way back to a limited, constitutional government that plays a very limited role in free-markets.

This is becoming a very exciting time to be alive for conservatives! May the results fit the promises!

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