I & I Editorial
Elizabeth Warren describes her “Plan for Economic Patriotism,” which she released on Tuesday, as a bold departure from the past.
“It’s time to reject the excuses we’ve heard for decades about why we can’t do more to help American workers,” she says in the document.
Warren and her team appear to have been asleep for the past two years.
How else to explain the fact that her plan completely ignores the substantial progress on jobs, wages and economic growth under President Trump, much less the reason behind these gains.
Warren, for example, complains about jobs lost overseas and stagnant wages, at a time when companies are re-shoring jobs and wages are growing at a rapid clip.
She complains about sluggish economic growth, then links to an Atlantic article from October 2016, which was trying to justify the terrible economy under President Obama. Didn’t anyone tell her that it’s 2019, and the economy has been booming?
Warren attacks trade agreements that she says didn’t help American workers, and links to an article attacking NAFTA — the same trade deal Trump repeatedly called the worst ever negotiated, and which he completely revamped with the goal of improving it for American companies and workers.
Then there are the policy proposals contained in Warren’s “Economic Patriotism” plan, most of which show that while Warren hates Trump with a passion, she’s happy to steal his ideas and repackage them as her own.
One of Warren’s “bold” ideas, for example, is to “consolidate existing government programs,” and rename the Department of Commerce the “Department of Economic Development.”
Trump last year produced a sweeping government reorganization plan. One of the proposals: “Coordinating and consolidating federal economic assistance resources into a Bureau of Economic Growth at Commerce.”
Warren wants to consolidate the myriad federal training programs. That’s also right there in Trump’s reorg plan.
In fact, Trump wants to go further by merging the Education and Labor departments into a single Department of Education and the Workforce, which would be “charged with meeting the needs of American students and workers from education and skill development to workplace protection to retirement security.”
Warren wants to “dramatically scale up apprenticeship programs,” but gives no credit to Trump, who signed an executive order last year creating the National Council for the American Worker and announcing that 23 companies had committed to train more than 3.8 million students.
Warren also promises to push the government to buy more American-made products.
Now, where have we heard that before? Oh, right, Trump has already been doing that. His administration says “government spending on foreign goods has fallen to its lowest point in 10 years” and “government spending on United States-made products has increased by $24 billion during the first two years of the administration over the previous two-year average.”
To be clear, Warren is hardly a tax-cutting, deregulating, free-market advocate. She’s the ideological clone of socialist Bernie Sanders. She would reverse Trump’s pro-growth tax cuts and deregulatory efforts the first chance she got, and massively increase the size and intrusiveness of the federal government. Her prescriptions would have the effect of killing the economy and destroying jobs.
But her far-left leanings make Warren’s attempt to cast herself as an “economic patriot” even more striking. When she tried to come up with ideas to back up that label, she apparently couldn’t find any in her own leftist playbook. So she ended up stealing most of them from Trump’s.
— Written by John Merline
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AOC has proposed legislation which could only be enacted with coercion and expropriation. (The New Green Deal)
Warren has proposed legislation which would require government licensing of corporations and which would make a seat on corporate boards for activists. (The Accountable Capitalism Act)
They want to change America like Pol Pot changed Cambodia.
This is what happens when the socialist-democrats have no platform that will improve the lives of American workers. The socialist-democrats have chosen to be rabidly anti Trump even as all of his economic policies have succeeded beyond hope. Now the socialist-democrats want to go full blown socialist and cover it by plagiarizing Trump’s platform. Look at Biden plagiarizing multiple environmental protection plans recently. You can only fool the fools consistently. It takes real ideas to convince the smarter half of the population. The socialist-democrats are running on empty.