Reactionaries on the campaign trail

Areactionary is someone who wishes to return, usually unrealistically, to an earlier and more appealing era. We have two reactionaries running for president. Both peddle agendas that promise to re-create a reassuring past. We are being fed different varieties of nostalgia. Neither will work.

Donald Trump is most explicit. He pledges to “make America great again.” To ensure the economy’s revival, Trump would resort to the standard Republican cure for slow growth: massive tax cuts. These would cost roughly $5 trillion over a decade, reckons the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Republicans talk casually about increasing annual economic growth to 3.5 percent to 4 percent, which is slightly above the 3.2 percent average from 1950 to 2015. But it’s way above the recent average of 2 percent. Although raising it doesn’t sound hard, it is. Part of the decline stems from the retirement of babyboom workers; that won’t change much. Most of the rest reflects stagnant productivity — the disappointing impact on growth of technology, management and worker skills — and is hard to influence in an $18 trillion economy.

Turn now to Hillary Clinton, who — like Trump — is busy resurrecting the past and calling it the future. The Democratic political formula is unchanging: Create handouts that make more Americans grateful for and dependent on government. Clinton has proposed raising Social Security benefits, paying tuition for most students at state colleges, funding universal preschool programs and helping parents cover child care costs.

All this is self-serving behavior. It’s using the public’s money to bribe the public, as is sometimes said. Actually, Democrats (and Republicans, too) have gone one step further. They bribe the public with borrowed money (budget deficits) and taxes on the wealthy.

Democracy increasingly becomes a cynical game in which the few subsidize benefits for the many. Government isn’t disciplined, because the many have little reason to discipline it. If most government appears “free” to most people, why bother?

Of course, a progressive tax system (the rich pay more) is desirable and many social programs are needed. But most could do with modernization. Two major programs — college student loans and Obamacare — have serious weaknesses. You might think a responsible government, before embarking on more social engineering, would fix existing programs. Perish the thought.

So the public is left contemplating two competing, but twisted, visions of the past. Trump evokes the early decades after World War II, when U.S. companies dominated the world. Clinton offers warmed-over 1960s’ activism based on the false optimism that government can easily regulate social change. This was and is a delusional simplification. What we are likely to get are new bureaucracies presiding over new grants, regulations and tax breaks that make government more intrusive and confusing.

One irrefutable sign of this campaign’s unseriousness is the virtual absence of any discussion of America’s aging. In 1960, fewer than one in 10 Americans was 65 or over; now it’s one in seven. This trend is unavoidable, but it is missing in action. How does it affect the economy and politics? How can we prevent spending on the elderly from crowding out other important functions of government?

So it is with many subjects. We get no discussion or simplistic discussion. There’s a reactionary celebration of the past that, no matter who wins, has one sure consequence: disappointment.