DeSantis pivots his war against wokeness to elites but still ignores fiscal reform
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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After tumbling some 25 points in the polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) axed one-third of his staff and seemed slated to finally log off Twitter for a much-needed reboot of his presidential campaign. As part of this pivot, the Florida governor finally published his first economic plan, a belated policy proposal considering that by most polls, the majority of people consider the economy the single most pressing issue in the 2024 election. But despite the name, DeSantis’s “Declaration of Economic Independence” says shockingly little about actual economic reform and much more about his new perceived enemy: the “elites.”
Buried at the very bottom is some crucial good that would constitute a dramatic improvement over our current president. Unlike President Joe Biden, DeSantis promises not to issue the sort of corporate bailouts received by Silicon Valley Bank and to protect cryptocurrencies. DeSantis also aligned himself with fellow GOP presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy in his monetary policy, proposing that the Federal Reserve solely prioritize dollar stability rather than the dual mandate, though DeSantis stops short of pledging to abolish the dual mandate by law.
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And like the rest of the pack, DeSantis pledges to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending as well as federal grants to those that “engage in active discrimination through DEI or other unconstitutional initiatives.” The dead last proposal in his declaration is a promise to enact work requirements for welfare programs.
The rest of DeSantis’s plan, which is to say the overwhelming majority of it, is sadly a culture war by another brand and a regrettable indication that this undoubted rising star of a Republican does not understand the perilous moment enveloping the U.S. economy, its dollar, and its taxpayers.
DeSantis correctly blasts the Fed’s 15 years of quantitative easing, the COVID lockdowns, and corporate welfare for contributing to the worst inflation in 40 years. But DeSantis then breaks out the canard that the primary cost of illegal immigration is competition with American workers, not the actual answer of national security threats and a drain on our bloated welfare empire.
DeSantis again aligns with Ramaswamy in his pledge to decouple our economy from that of China, but again, DeSantis elevates fallacious protectionism as a rationale over the real and existential national security risks of Beijing’s stranglehold over the West.
Two of DeSantis’s first principles are indistinguishable from those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: that we must sacrifice our comparative advantage to bring back domestic manufacturing, and that we must regress to single-income households, a historically anomalous state of affairs that left households much poorer in real terms than today.
DeSantis’s actual, top-line deliverables are a mixed bag. On top of the aforementioned monetary policy and generalized spending cuts, the good includes expanding school choice and vocational training, putting universities on the hook for the student loan bubble, ensuring that fiduciary duties override ESG priorities among financiers, restoring Trump-era energy independence, and banning de facto inside trading among members of the federal government. The giant question mark of his proposal is the promise of 3% annual GDP growth — something that has to make Joe Biden laugh, considering that the Atlanta Fed already predicts we’ll achieve an annualized 3.5% growth rate for the third quarter of this year.
The worst part of DeSantis’s proposal is not quite “ugly,” but it does reflect a fundamental refusal to understand the impending labor shortage about to doom the taxpayers and an increasingly insolvent Uncle Sam. DeSantis boasts he will ban chain migration and limit unskilled immigration — but he doesn’t mention increasing skilled immigration.
In this way, DeSantis is no different than Donald Trump. In a vacuum, that is far from damning, but for those of us who thought DeSantis was orders of magnitude better than Donald Trump, it is indeed disappointing.
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The basic trends dooming the economy go something like this: after a bunch of boomers decided to expand Great Society welfare programs, they failed to have the number of children needed to fund such an expansion. In the process, we’ve gotten fatter and more depressed, while the Fed financed a further explosion of discretionary spending — but antithetical to the principles of left-wing Keynesianism, it did so while we were in a period of economic expansion. We are now facing a future where two workers are on the hook for each boomer’s Medicare, Social Security, and other freebies from Uncle Sam.
DeSantis’s plan does little to solve the demand equation of this catastrophe (namely the issue of projected federal outlays), and it actively makes the labor supply worse. This plan is better thought of as another diatribe against wokeness than a serious economic proposal we would expect from a politician as proven and competent as DeSantis.