By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
The Republican party in America has for decades been the party that typically represents more free market ideals and more broadly capitalist advocacy over Democrats. The concept of ‘Trickle Down’ economics was spearheaded largely by the era of Neo-Conservative Republicans like Ronald Reagan with ‘Reaganomics’ or either of the Bushes. But recently, Donald Trump has seemingly eradicated this type of idea from the Republican party and transformed their economic ideals instead into more isolationist and rails harder against the free market.
One of the cornerstones of Trump’s original campaign was bringing jobs back from overseas. For anyone unfamiliar, according to the NAICS, from 1991 to 2019, almost 9 million American manufacturing jobs were lost to overseas workforces. This concept is called outsourcing and it’s when corporations opt to use factories and or workers in foreign countries instead of the US, usually, because wages are cheaper, workplace safety is less important, fewer employee benefits, less powerful unions to fight; it’s just cheaper typically for corporations to utilize workers in foreign countries. An easy way to think about it is to compare a US car manufacturer worker who probably has a strong union to fight on their behalf to earn better healthcare, wages, and benefits, and the US has restrictions in place to protect workers when compared to China where unions are illegal and workers have fewer laws in place to protect them from exploitation. Aside from these jobs lost overseas, automation too poses a threat to many blue-collar jobs. And this effect of jobs being lost to automation and outsourcing was felt in huge effect throughout states dominated by manufacturing economies like in the Rust Belt, or South-West. This was a large part of his initial support, and understandably so because workers in these areas felt like they had lost their livelihoods.
Trump’s solution to jobs being lost was his trade wars of tariffs and reversing of trade deals Trump did, like his 250 Billion dollar Chinese tariffs, or his backing out of NAFTA and the TPP. These were more isolationist legislative ideas that went against the market forces of globalization. When jobs are lost to automation or cheaper labor, that means products and services can be produced at a cheaper cost and consequently become more affordable. Not to say outsourcing is always a positive thing, but from a different point of view, overall everyone else who wasn’t reliant on these jobs benefited from outsourcing. If all of these American corporations were forced to do all their manufacturing on American soil with American workers and all their expenses, simple products which most Americans can afford could become outrageously expensive.
Another one of, if not the biggest, items Trump ran on was immigration. If you can remember back to 2015, Trump’s entire campaign seemed inseparable from his radical speeches on immigration and his infamous border wall. But one important thing he glossed over in his rhetoric was economic benefits. Immigrants to the US are usually willing to work harder jobs for lesser pay, and actually make significant contributions to the American economy. According to New American Economy, Mexican immigrants earned around 82 billion dollars in spending power, which was invested back into local economies. Mexican immigrant workers were also found to participate in a higher percentage than native-born workers. And this is consistent with the vast majority of economic studies which indicate immigration from Mexico whether or not causes any social issues or whatnot, has a dramatic positive impact on our economy. With immigration, Trump usually had two routes of talking which were paradoxical; Trump either described an immigrant who was willing to take lesser wages to steal American jobs or an immigrant who crossed over simply to commit a crime and soak up welfare. The crime part doesn’t add up, considering there’s almost no evidence to suggest immigrants commit crimes at disproportionate levels to native-born Americans. But Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t really based on strictly anti-market forces, but just general anti-immigration because there can’t be an immigrant who’s willing to risk committing a crime, welfare abuse, and deportation, and yet still decided to contribute more to the economy to earn their living. So there’s clearly a bigger picture of Trump’s ideology on immigration, but whether intentionally or not, it aligns with policy-making against the will of the market.
None of this is inherently a criticism of Trump or unyielding support of the free market in a libertarian sense, but just that it’s important to draw the distinction between Republicans of old who were typically the ones who advocated less government intervention in the economy, and supported big corporations, against the Republicans today who are more critical of large corporations and are willing to sacrifice more of the market for whatever ideological goals they have. What these goals are is a different topic, and it ties in with conservatism, but whether Trump himself changed the face of Republican economic policy, or whether he tapped into an already existing common outlook Republicans held is something I think worth considering as well.