The headline states the considerations. A web screen capture and one online item: first, https://x.com/johanknorberg/status/1813882011183902974
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| allegedly Vance said that |
Bernie is an elder statesman of the Senate, an independent, and almost as old as Nancy Pelosi. Being in the same age range, and having Democratic Socialist ideas it has been easy to advocate for Bernie for President, etc.
The Trump/Vance victory has been attributed to white working class men, and Bernie has not ever shown a racial dimension to his policies.
Bernie has been consistent about "the ruling class" and "greed" with a sidebar image on point. Trump promises some form of realignment, with trepidation attached within online items, but with an election win.
Trump, Vance too, both, either, has yet to advocate Medicare for All. Were that to happen, Crabgrass would reevaluate opinions. It is not expected here that any reevaluation will be needed. The challenge is phrased, let them respond.
Next, NPR's Planet Money from mid July, this year: "The economic mind of JD Vance." beginning:
Last week, former President Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance to be his running mate. And a host of traditional free-market conservatives and libertarians were less than thrilled. In fact, up until the eleventh hour before Vance's selection, big Republican donors lobbied their butts off to try to convince Trump to pick someone else.
In some ways, Vance has the résumé of someone you'd think old-school conservatives would be happy with. He's a former Marine, a Yale-educated lawyer, a bestselling author and a successful venture capitalist. He's staunchly conservative on social issues. He's the embodiment of the American dream, rising from humble working-class roots in Ohio to become a self-made millionaire. He's well connected to titans of business in Silicon Valley, and he has proven his ability to help raise millions of dollars in political donations for Trump.
But Vance is far from a traditional conservative, at least these days (he has had a self-acknowledged political transformation over the last decade). In his less than two years in the Senate, Vance has emerged as one of the brightest minds in what has been called "the New Right" or "national conservatism." It's an intellectual and political movement that departs from the free-market fundamentalism and foreign policy hawkishness of the Republicans of yesteryear. We've covered this growing ideological schism in the Republican Party before in the Planet Money newsletter. At least in rhetoric, this new populist wing of the party sounds less like Ronald Reagan and more like Bernie Sanders meets aggressive social conservatism, isolationism and nativism.
With Trump's selection of Vance as his heir apparent, it seems clearer that this wing of the Republican Party is ascendant. In this Planet Money newsletter, we step into the economic mind of JD Vance to get a sense of what his vision is for American economic policy.
Vance's heterodox economics
Perhaps most illustrative of Vance's break from Reagan-style conservatism, the 39-year-old senator regularly opposes bedrock free-market principles and advocates for more muscular government intervention in the economy.
Vance opposes free trade and advocates for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Prominent economists argue that Trump's proposals for higher tariffs and more restrictive immigration (including Trump's policy goal to deport millions of undocumented workers) would make goods and services more expensive for American consumers, reignite inflation, hurt businesses and harm the overall economy.
We shall see if that scenario develops. It is likely. It is unlikely. Who knows. The item next states:
But Vance has a different view, stressing that, by reducing competition with cheap foreign and immigrant labor, these policies will help American workers. “The economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs," Vance told The New York Times in May. "Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it's massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects."
In his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Vance blamed undocumented immigrants for increasing the scarcity of affordable housing. He went on, "We're done importing foreign labor. We're going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages."
The item moves to specifics where readers have the link to read detail, with one additional quote, mid-item:
In a March profile of Vance in Politico Magazine, the senator sought to explain why, despite being purportedly supportive of workers, he opposed the PRO Act. First, he said, he thought that the PRO Act would further ensconce the existing system of collective bargaining in the U.S., which occurs between workers and employers at the establishment level. He said he supports the European style of collective bargaining, where instead of contracts covering workers at specific businesses, contracts cover entire industrial sectors.
Last year, we spoke to economist Suresh Naidu, one of the leading scholars of unions in America. Like Vance, Naidu expressed support for sectoral bargaining. He preferred that system because, among other benefits, it weakened incentives for companies to fight unions. When a contract covers a whole industrial sector, he said, it means competitors are on a more even playing field because every single one of them is subject to the same union contract.
However, unlike Vance, Naidu was supportive of the PRO Act. Naidu clearly believed more needed to be done to boost unionization. But he didn't see the PRO Act as standing in the way of further reforms. Likewise, left-wing supporters of the PRO Act have argued it is an important piece of legislation for workers, even though they see it as just a starting point for further reforms to revitalize collective bargaining in the United States.
The other reason he opposed the PRO Act, Vance said, was, basically, many unions in the U.S. support Democrats. "I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican," Vance said.
Vance has questioned the value of the dollar as an international reserve currency and suggested that a weaker dollar would benefit the American economy. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. dollar has played a special role in the global economy: It's the "international reserve currency," or the main currency the world uses to trade and save (for more, read our newsletter here and listen to this classic Planet Money episode here).
For a long time, mainstream Republicans and Democrats have supported this special role for the dollar. It offers the U.S. a host of benefits, including the ability for the government to borrow at lower interest rates. The benefits that come from the dollar being the international reserve currency is sometimes called the "exorbitant privilege."
But last year, in a Senate hearing with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Vance questioned the value of this special role for the dollar. Sure, he said, it may strengthen the dollar, which boosts American consumers' ability to buy foreign goods and travel abroad. "But it does come at a cost to American producers," Vance said. "I think in some ways you can argue that the reserve currency status is a massive subsidy to American consumers but a massive tax on American producers." This, he suggested, contributes to "our mass consumption of mostly useless imports, on the one hand, and our hollowed-out industrial base on the other hand."
Bernie may have discussed dollar diplomacy, and a policy objective to oppose regimes suggesting oil be priced otherwise than in dollars per barrel, but Crabgrass is not aware of it being a question Bernie cares to address. And Bernie likes unions as a sidebar item notes re the UAW.
And JD has yet to discuss the medical industrial complex as far as I know, with any policy to rein in its excesses. Bernie has. Often.
A word search = medical - on that item got no hits. The ball is in JD's court. He can play it or not. He can leave Big Pharma and such out of his pronouncements, but that would say something by omission. Where is JD on the issue? What will Trump propose to do with Obama's institution of Romneycare nationwide? We wait finding out.
So, who are we really dealing with, and what actual changes are set to be tried?
_________UPDATE________
Sometimes it helps to write a bottom line. Sometimes not.
BOTTOM LINE: If JD really feels it necessary or helpful to him to attract "Bernie bros" he damn well knows how to start, and if it's bullshit, he won't.
Phrased that way, why were so many words used getting there?