There is a long article in the NY Times today that I plowed through because I thought I should. It discussed something I am very familiar with from my business career. It even focused on a factory that was owned by a company I worked for when I worked for that company. And within that article is the essence of the challenge the Democrats face.
The Democrats need an economic message that is compelling to rural workers in order to get the rural workers who do not care deeply about social issues to vote for Democrats. And they do not have one for a simple reason. Bill Clinton moved the Democrats to the center on economics and I supported him 100% in doing that. But in the process the Democrats signed onto the following covenant that is central to economic policy (again what I believe is proper economic policy): the capitalist central thought that Return on Capital is the most efficient measure by which drive an economy forward.
Now that works for you if you are employed in a way that puts your activity in an advantageous position vis a vis your competition for employment. But within that covenant is also the assumption that labor will migrate to find employment and that labor can be retrained if their activity is not well positioned in the global competition for work. But that involves turmoil and angst for the people whose work migrates to a lower cost pool of labor. That turmoil and angst creates anger within the people effected. Donald Trump captured that anger with words and is in all likelihood going to disappoint those people with his failure to make a difference for them.
But that does not mean those people will vote for Democrats unless there is a Democratic policy that they can believe in. The conundrum for the Democrats is many of their voters believe, as do I, that capitalism is central to Democracy and we all benefit from letting our economy be driven by return on capital. So any policy the Democrats come up has to have sufficient believability to get Trump economic voters to vote Democratic, but not upset the Democrats who believe in capitalism.
There is not much to like about Trumpism, but he did identify a real issue that neither the Democrats nor Republicans have addressed since the JFK/LBJ administration developed the Great Society.
As a free trader, I am generally supportive of lowering and leaving low all tariff barriers. Our society benefits from free trade in myriad ways. But if there were a way within the international trade treaty construct to tax all imports in favor of exports, I think the U.S. should pursue such a policy. Now figuring out what that would look like takes real expertise in the specifics of trade treaties and what levels of tax/tax reduction would do to inflation/employment/factory location.
No government can direct companies to locate a factory in any specific place. All government can do is generate a policy that will guide events in a general direction. But those policies are what people who need employment must believe in when they decide who they will vote for. That does not translate to sound bites and has to be conveyed in sound bites but be implemented in a sound way and have an effect by the next election (hopefully).
That is a tall order, but that is also the challenge for the Democrats if they want to be competitive in the rural vote. Obama didn't have a message for those people after 2008 and that is why Trump won those voters despite his many faults. Hillary Clinton was just offering the voters more of what Obama did and it didn't work for those people. Democrats need a snappy sound bite that represents a real change in policy that will make a difference for rural employment.
Link to Link-Belt Employment Article
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