Reflections on the Vance-Walz Vice-Presidential Debate – Currency Thoughts

Reflections on the Vance-Walz Vice-Presidential Debate

October 3, 2024

Among the various factors that impact U.S. voter predispositions, vice-presidential debates generally rank low. Nonetheless, last Tuesday’s event was illuminating in helping to shed light on some faulty arguments that are being made. Here are five:

1. Should Vice President Harris be held accountable for things both good and bad that happened since President Biden entered office? Nobody ever characterized the VP post as the place where the buck stops, and scant evidence exists of a veep overriding a sitting president’s preference on any important issue. A number of former holders of the post such as Lyndon Johnson felt greatly diminished after leaving a more influential position. It is particularly ironic that the Trump-Vance team has framed the 2024 election as a report card on the Biden Presidency. Rather than give his own VP, Mike Pence, any credit for what happened during his own presidency, Donald Trump in the end lacked any empathy for Pence against a Capitol Hill mob that wanted to lynch him.
2.  A comparison of low and stable inflation during the Trump presidency versus the sharp jump in the cost of living during 2021-22 has cemented the popular belief that the U.S. economy would perform better in a second Trump presidency than if Harris won. For one thing, the U.S. price experience after the Covid pandemic was mimicked by a broad spectrum of other countries big and small, industrialized as well as developing ones, democratically led or authoritarian. That’s strong evidence that the cycle derived from global, not national, factors, and the fact is that the U.S. maintained stronger growth than most places during the period of high inflation and even more so in its wake. Actually, a comparison of the U.S. economy under Republican versus Democratic presidencies since 1961 reveals a clear difference that favors the Democrats, as documented in a number of prior posts on this website.
3. Should expertise be solicited on important issues and carry weight in guiding government policies in influencing public policy? The anti-elite movement has attracted lots of followers, giving birth to the acronym RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). Why then bother to have law schools or med schools? Do we want to send troops into combat only after they get basic and advanced infantry training? Well yes, because slotting people into jobs is more productive when guided by a system based on merit rather than patronage. The prominence of high tariffs in the Trump team’s economic policy proposals disregards the conclusions of trained economists who repeatedly studied the matter and found that policy tool to be both inflationary and a drag on potential economic growth.
4. The Republicans are considered much more reliable on the issue of gun rights than Democrats. Given the enthusiasm of both Trump and Vance for empowering the presidency, the presumption that constraints on gun ownership are less likely under a Trump-Vance stewardship looks overly simplistic. In countries that already are highly authoritarian, such as Hungary, China, and North Korea, controls governing private gun ownership happen to be very strict. In protecting gun ownership in the Bill of Rights, America’s founding father considered such a right as an essential protection against the return of a new monarchy or other tyrant who might assume unchecked powers over the people and any political opponents. In their minds, that danger was more likely to arise from within than abroad given the two oceans that seal America off from other continents.
5. Vance and Trump have boasted that 2017-20 were comparatively peaceful years both for the United States and the broader world. They suggest that Putin never would have raided Ukraine if Trump had still been president in 2022 and also maintain that Trump’s approach to foreign policy exudes a toughness that disparages bad guys from attempting to wage war. An alternative explanation for the peace in 2017-20 simply is that Trump cultivated better relations with America’s rivals such as Russia, North Korea, and China than with natural allies in Asia and Europe. That approach might work in the short run, but the ill-fated Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 exposed the dangers of such an approach.

Copyright 2024, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.

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