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From the Dallas Morning News, Friday, June 13:
John McCain and Barack Obama portray themselves as new-school presidential candidates willing to break with party orthodoxies. On economic policies, however, they're distinctly old-school guys dancing to the same old party beats.
It's hard to separate McCain from standard supply-side economics and Obama from customary tax-and-spend programs. Neither offers the kind of creative economic thinking these times require.
McCain, once more nuanced about tax cutting, now talks as if it's 1980 and there's no American economic problem that a few more tax cuts can't fix. Likewise, Obama's proposals to rein in corporate profits, redistribute the tax burden and narrow economic inequality sound a lot like Democratic Party boilerplate from 1980, 1990 or even 2000.
This isn't change. It's partisan ideology, unchecked by economic reality. It plays to core party principles and little else.
History shows there are limits to free-market policies and big government spending. Eventually, each tactic runs its course as economic conditions change.
Anti-tax sentiment has become so deeply ingrained among conservatives that Republican regulars even forget that Ronald Reagan raised taxes. Similarly, Obama's populism pits rich against poor, as if all of the nation's problems can be laid at the feet of wealthy Americans or solved by wealth redistribution.
America's economic challenges require a more considered response than regurgitated blue-state-red-state talking points. Obama should remember that American wealth depends on free-market competition and to the flow of products and human intellectual capital across borders. Demonizing free trade and corporations undercuts broad long-term prosperity.
Similarly, McCain can't simply fall back on free-market ideology to reflexively dismiss government intervention in economic matters. His sluggish response to the housing crisis illuminates his undiscriminating adherence to market ideology without fully recognizing the cascading threat that rising foreclosures and a credit crunch posed to an entire economy.
Reality may force the next president to moderate his economic worldview in the direction of pragmatism in this especially volatile environment. The insecurity of the middle and working classes in a globalizing economy defies traditional left-right policy solutions.
As one of these two men eventually will discover.
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