March 25, 2018
It said this clearly in a front page article. The piece tells readers how Republicans are falling in line behind Trump’s agenda. After noting that the new budget passed by Congress will lead to a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2019, the article comments:
“It was another example of how Trump seems to have overtaken his party’s previously understood values, from a willingness to flout free-trade principles and fiscal austerity to a seeming abdication of America’s role as a global voice for democratic values.”
Since this is an economics blog, I’ll leave it to others to speculate how anyone might have understood a party that led the invasion of Iraq under a false pretext to be a global voice for democratic values. I’ll instead focus on the Republican Party’s alleged commitment to “free trade and fiscal austerity.”
I may have missed it, but I never heard a single prominent Republican propose any measure that would reduce the protectionist rules that limit the number of foreign doctors, allowing our doctors to earn twice as much on average as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This difference in doctors pay costs us $100 billion annually or approximately $800 per household. There is ten times as much money at stake with doctors alone as with the steel tariffs that have gotten so much attention. Protection for other professionals could easily double this number.
No one committed to free trade could find this protectionism acceptable. The “free trade” Republicans have generally supported has been about removing barriers that protect less highly educated workers, putting downward pressure on their pay. That implies a commitment to redistributing income upward (one shared by the Washington Post), not free trade.
The Republican trade agenda also involves making patent and copyright monopolies longer and stronger and spreading these rules internationally. These are incredibly costly forms of protectionism. In the case of prescription drugs alone, patents and related protections add more than $370 billion (almost 2.0 percent of GDP) to what we pay for prescription drugs each year.
The commitment to fiscal austerity is equally absurd. The deficit exploded in the Reagan years due to his tax cuts and increases in military spending. It also exploded under George W. Bush due to his tax cuts and wars. Why on earth would anyone think that the Republican Party had a commitment to fiscal austerity?
So, the take away from this piece is the Washington Post wants its readers to believe that the Republicans had been committed to free trade and fiscal austerity before Trump. That might be true in Washington Postland, where NAFTA caused Mexico’s GDP to quadruple, but not in the real world.
Addendum:
An earlier version had an incorrect number for the per household cost of excess payments to doctors. Thanks to Robert Salzberg for calling my attention to the error.
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