Donald Trump shows he is the real champion of ‘big government’
In their campaign’s closing arguments, President Donald Trump and his surrogates are again fearmongering that a vote for
Joe Biden is a vote for “a socialist agenda” and “big government.”
That’s not exactly the most credible cudgel. If anyone in this presidential campaign has massively expanded the scope (if not efficacy) of the state, it’s the incumbent. In dollars spent, market interventions and red tape, Trump has more than proved himself the candidate of big government.
Even before the pandemic — and the rounds of related fiscal relief that followed — Trump oversaw a massive increase in government spending. During his first three years in office, he signed legislation that added more than $4 trillion to the federal debt, according to a January estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Less than half of this red ink came from tax cuts; the majority was from higher government spending.
This expansionary fiscal policy is the only reason that the economy had been growing (modestly) faster under Trump than it did under President Barack Obama. If you strip out the effects of federal spending, the economy grew at the same pace during the Obama portion of the decade-long pre-coronavirus expansion as it did during the Trump phase, as a recent Wall Street Journal analysis pointed out.
Large chunks of Trump-era spending have been reserved for politically important constituencies. Forget those heartland diatribes against socialism: Trump has funneled record subsidies to farmers. This year, more than one-third of net farm income is expected to come from direct government payments.
Trump has tried (so far unsuccessfully) to offer bribes for older voters, too, in the form of $200 prescription drug cards.
The candidate who supposedly treasures free markets has also repeatedly intervened, or asked underlings to, in the functioning of markets — through tariffs, regulations, politically motivated antitrust filings and subsidies. Some of these tools of government have been weaponized against perceived enemies, such as social media companies, news organizations and even car manufacturers. Others have been wielded as favors to friends, including through sweetheart, no-bid government contracts, or bailouts designed to prop up failing pet industries, such as coal.
Truly it is Trump, not Biden, who has modeled what a command-and-control-style economy looks like.
For a man who claims to hate bureaucracy — and has even signed executive orders condemning it! — Trump has been remarkably dedicated to thickening its ranks. Not for the purpose of serving the public (as a bleeding-heart Democrat might be accused of doing); no, perversely, Trump has expanded bureaucracy with the express purpose of finding new ways to deny services to the public.
The Trump administration has added layers of impenetrable red tape designed to make it harder to access benefits or rights to which constituents are legally entitled.
Forcing people to file more paperwork or jump through more hoops is supposed to conserve taxpayer dollars. Ironically, pathologically hunting for excuses to deny people services often requires more official resources — thus, bigger government.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for instance, has shifted its emphasis away from benefit provision and toward fraud prevention, despite scant evidence that undetected fraud had been rising or was a major problem. Since Trump took office, the agency more than doubled the number of employees fighting fraud, and has otherwise diverted more resources to scouring immigrants’ paperwork in search of frivolous reasons to reject eligible applicants. USCIS has wasted so much money that it is crying poverty. It spent most of the spring and summer begging for a congressional bailout.
Similarly, the administration’s push for states to add Medicaid work requirements required hundreds of millions of dollars of additional spending, an analysis by the independent Government Accountability Office found. That’s because of the massive administrative costs needed to implement these requirements and identify the tiny sliver of people who don’t meet them. Trump will continue to lie that he’s brought down deficits, liberated markets, hacked away red tape. But, as always with Trump, pay more attention to what he does than what he says.