Word: buchananism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...training and education is not an issue Republicans are inclined to seize. House Republicans have axed the $750 million budget for Clinton's program to improve skills via the public schools--the Goals 2,000 package, strongly backed by a group of CEOs known as the Business Roundtable. Buchanan has promised to do the same, and for that matter to ax the whole Education Department...
Perhaps the biggest problem with Buchanan's trade platform is the premise that trade is a big part of the problem. Most economists concur that trade with low-wage nations depresses low-skill American wages, but most don't think the effect is very large. Stanford economist Paul Krugman points out that in 1990 nonoil imports from low-wage nations amounted to 2.8% of America's GDP--a low number and, more to the point, barely higher than the 2.2% figure for 1960, back before low-skill American wages started dropping...
President Clinton's proposed cure for the wage problem--creating a better-educated, more highly skilled work force--is in theory more versatile than Buchanan's. True, the Clinton approach was crafted with trade in mind; Labor Secretary Robert Reich, like Buchanan, stresses the role of economic globalization in displacing low-skilled American workers. But Reich's plan, unlike Buchanan's, makes about equal sense regardless of what the problem is. Whether workers are displaced by low-skilled immigrants, low-skilled foreigners or technology, they need new skills...
...Though Buchanan is more comfortable than his Republican rivals with rhetorically assaulting the rich, he doesn't seem eager to assault them financially. He favors a capital-gains tax cut, and he wants to replace the present income tax with a "flat tax." The fine points aren't yet clear, but the history of undetailed and supposedly populist flat tax proposals is not auspicious. The one proposed by Congressman Richard Armey in 1994 turned out to feature a revenue shortfall of more than $200 billion, according to a Treasury Department analysis. When the department hypothetically narrowed the plan's deductions...
...fell for the second one-fifth--and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The potential appeal of a sharply redistributive income tax is unknown, but this simple math suggests it's bigger than before and getting bigger. And that is President Clinton's issue to claim--not Buchanan's, not Gramm's, not Dole...