Trump has made a powerful case for expanding the private sector, aside from his trade policies, which address a strategic priority regarding China at considerable cost.
He has yet to make the case for shrinking government. He should get moving on that.
He has yet to make the case for shrinking government. He should get moving on that.
Trump can campaign in 2020 on telling the American people they can get much more of the prosperity they've tasted by clawing back money from the federal government, reducing the immense burden it puts on the economy. This is also the ONLY way to reduce corruption.
Showing voters how Leviathan government inevitably leads to huge amounts of corruption and waste is an important part of the response to pie-in-the-sky socialist proposals.
If Trump doesn't put forward some serious proposals for reducing the size of government, he'll get hammered for running up the deficit. Socialists will blame tax cuts for the debt and ask how anyone can say no to their generous spending plans if trillion-plus deficits are OK.
Also, the growth achieved by Trump's policies thus far has been impressive and profoundly embarrassing for Obama-worshipers, but it hasn't quite been TRANSFORMATIVE yet. It's getting there, but it needs to shift into a higher gear to begin transforming society.
All this crazy junk you see Democrats proposing has the true goal of transforming society toward collectivism in one of its many ugly permutations. The nominal goal is entirely incidental to the true objective of centralizing power and diminishing the private sector.
Every left-wing plan comes with a vision for what society will look like when the Left is finished fundamentally transforming it. They're always hideously wrong about what actually happens, of course, but they blame that on the wretched and deplorable people, not their designs.
The Right needs leadership that thinks and acts more boldly to transform society in a positive direction. Given the current size and wealth of our central government, that is impossible to do without cutting the State down to size.
Americans may be ready at last to hear that message, in a way they were not when the Tea Party revolution tried to send it. They've seen the failures of Obama's super-statism and had a taste of what the unleashed private sector can do. Our oil industry is transforming the world.
And people are utterly sick to death of political correctness and the hyper-politicization of everything. One reason they like Trump is that he verbally pushes back against that crap. He should fight it with POLICY too.
If you don't like every square inch of your life being politicized, you want smaller government, less regulation, less government-supported activism, less focus on Washington political squabbles as the center of the universe. If you don't like the game, lower the stakes.
Trump has a chance to build on what he's done, demonstrate the strength of his convictions by pushing further to achieve his ultimate goals, remind people what an unholy disaster our political elites are, and unify the GOP around the agenda it has only half-heartedly pursued.
You know what the response will be: If you cut one dime from government, a billion poor people will die, a hundred million hard-working government employees will lose their jobs, society will collapse, blah blah blah.
The problem for the Left is that messages like that don't sell as well in times of general prosperity, high employment, upward mobility, wage growth, and consumer confidence. In such times, socialism has to shift from "nobody can survive without the State" to welfarism.
In boom times, socialists change their message to demanding more alms for those "left behind," which the public can see is a relatively small group. This leaves them with far less support for grandiose plans to "fundamentally transform America."
Fear is the only way the Left can subdue its hated enemy, the middle class. You see this all the time, especially with deranged left-wing health care proposals. People only fall for those con jobs when they're AFRAID they'll be ruined by illness or unable to get care.
In boom times, people aren't afraid. They're more receptive to messages about making what they need affordable so they can buy it themselves. They don't mind making SEPARATE provisions for the unfortunate instead of fundamentally transforming systems that work for most.
The greatest swindle in American history was the Left using fear from the 2008 financial crisis its lunatic housing policies created as leverage to sucker the middle class into accepting socialism. Trump should reverse that process by doing the opposite of what they did.
Trump's election was in many ways a response to what had gone before. His re-election campaign should offer a comprehensive vision of what comes next. It is a step we should take as a society, not just as voters making small adjustments to our government. /end
