Private Opportunity is Better than Public Subsidy

President Donald J. Trump applauds the crowd as he is introduced on stage at the Summit on Transforming Mental Health Treatment on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building South Court Auditorium at the White House. (Official White House Photos by Tia Dufour)

You wouldn’t know it by listening to the arguments in any of the recent Democratic primary debates, but tax cuts, and smaller government in general, have been good for the American economy every time they’ve been tried. Daniel Henninger, writing at The Wall Street Journal, explains that like his forbears, Reagan and Coolidge, President Trump understands “that private opportunity is better than public subsidy.” He writes (abridged):

As he starts his re-election campaign, Mr. Trump is putting Hoover behind him, preferring instead to run on Coolidge’s record of an expanding economy whose job and wage turbines are humming. And by the way, Pete Buttigieg isn’t the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Depression and FDR transformed the Democratic Party. It adopted as an article of faith, held to this day by every Democratic presidential candidate, that any tear in the social fabric should be mended with permanent entitlements or subsidies. The competing idea is that subsidies are a poor substitute for finding and holding a job in a vibrant private economy.

That’s what President Coolidge believed in the 1920s, and the belief that private opportunity is better than public subsidy has been kept alive the past century by such public figures as Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s gut-level belief in the power of the private economy is an attribute that gets overwhelmed by the daily drama.

Read more here.

You can read more about Cool Cal here.