The 'Pro-Worker' GOP Is Anti-Worker
The New Right talks a big populist game, but their policies hurt the people they're supposed to help.

Members of the new right wing of the Republican Party have proclaimed themselves the champions of the working class. I am sure they mean it, despite many of them being among the elite of the elite. And because so many are lawyers—including those like vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance who come from an elite Ivy League school—we can forgive them for failing to understand that their economic policies would hurt, not help, the working class.
Part of the shift is because Republicans don't believe they should continue as the so-called party of big business. They are correct. It's a sad fact that traditional Republican politicians have often confused being for free markets with propping up and protecting big banks and other companies with subsidies and other handouts. The fact that Democrats do the same doesn't excuse Republicans' behavior.
A first essential step to earning the moniker of the party of the people is ending all subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and other government-granted privileges to big corporations. That will undo much of the bias toward businesses while allowing markets to do their jobs and raise all economic boats.
I doubt the new populists will do it. Instead, expect more counterproductive "pro-worker" policies like raising the corporate income tax. Taxes are paid only by flesh-and-blood people, and corporations, well, are not people.
In other words, corporations don't really pay taxes. For instance, they pass the corporate income tax on to workers in the form of lower wages, to consumers in the form of higher prices, and to shareholders in the form of lower dividends and share valuations (which can mean reduced values of workers' pensions). It's like a game of hot potato, except the potato is on fire and always lands in the laps of those at the end of the line—the very people faux populists claim to be helping.
Imagine workers' surprise when they find wages stagnating faster than a politician's principles during election season. "At least we stuck it to the corporations!" the politicians will say as workers tighten their belts another notch.
Calls for industrial policy suffer from the same flaws. On the right, these arguments are usually about propping up industries said to be crucial for national security and a desire to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., particularly regions hit hard by deindustrialization.
Even ignoring the fact that America's industrial base is doing well—capacity is at an all-time high—industrial policy inevitably involves the government providing subsidies, tax credits, tariffs, and other special privileges to a few large, well-connected corporations. This cronyism is of no benefit to most ordinary workers; it's a boondoggle for the politically powerful. It will hurt working class taxpayers.
Just look at President Joe Biden's industrial policy. It was meant to ensure U.S. self-sufficiency in critical sectors like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and advanced technologies. The cost has been between $1.2 and $2.1 trillion in domestic subsidies for preferred manufacturers. While the administration likes to claim the subsidies will ultimately benefit workers, companies, often big and rich ones, are reaping taxpayer dollars for projects they would have likely undertaken anyway. For instance, about half of all Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) projects were announced before the IRA was passed, and the private green market was booming even before the subsidies.
In Washington, D.C., apparently, nothing says "power to the people" quite like funneling taxpayer money to large corporations. But let's not forget the piece de resistance: tariffs. How better to help ordinary Americans than by raising their cost of living?
Watch as prices rise further on goods and services affected by tariffs. Reduced competition in the marketplace leads to a world where workers pay more for less. Unfortunately, these price hikes will hit lower-income families hardest. It's like a regressive tax but with a populist bow on top. Then, as other countries retaliate with their own tariffs on American products, we get to play everyone's favorite game of trade war. American exporters will struggle, and productivity and economic growth will slow.
By all means, make America great again—but what does that have to do with making everything more expensive for American producers, workers, and consumers alike? The New Right talks a good game about being the new workers' party, but its marquee policies would bring higher prices and cronyism under a misleading banner of populism.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Geez fuck this magazine is all in on the Defeat Republicans bandwagon. Not even pretending to be both sides in their headlines anymore.
ANd, check this shit:
Just look at President Joe Biden's industrial policy.
Seriously the article is all about how horrible those awful right wingers are to the common man and the example of how? Yeah, Joe Biden's policies.
Fuck you people are blatant. Assuming nobody reads past the headline or first paragraph, I'm guessing.
That’s not entirely fair. The headline is stupidly biased, but most of TFA is politically neutral, with one Trump paragraph and one Biden paragraph. And I have heard many times that writers don’t choose their own headlines.
So blame Reason for a biased headline, but the article itself isn’t.
It IS Reason I blame for that horseshit. You can tell by my comment beginning with "Geez fuck this magazine..."
Californian speak with forked necktie.
VVhat the fuck are you talking about?
Or are you just here because you are going to try and scam people with your fake website again?
FOAD with your fake website, asshole.
But most of the article is also framed in the language of speculation about what the Republican policies in the next administration would be. And the speculation might be correct, but it's still speculation. "Oh, they aren't really going to become pro-worker and populist because they probably won't change their policies!"
Unless de Rugy has a crystal ball, this is just bafflegab. And what's the option at this point? Can anyone even fathom how appalling a Kamala Harris industrial policy would be?
"...Can anyone even fathom how appalling a Kamala Harris industrial policy would be?..."
Harris? "Industrial policy"? Not sure they should be in one sentence.
Step one: Nationalize everything
Step two: Keep blaming the evil corporations for everything that isn't the fault of racism and/or sexism and/or transphobia.
Never-mind the author literally pitched the idea that Republicans would raise taxes while the last Trump Administration did Tax-Cuts. Yeah the whole thing is pretty biased.
NOTHING here is politically neutral. If you think ANY article you have read ANYWHERE is politically neutral, you are revealing YOUR bias.
I think the destructive effects of Biden's cronyism and tariffs are a known item. The author here is **importantly** reminding us that those who are looking to Trump for a solution are placing their hope in the wrong man.
Still better than what anyone else is offering.
We could reluctantly, but strategically, vote Harris I to office and get Bernienomics.
Which would really screw the workers.
Sigh.
Then it bashes Biden after bashing Trump.
Most of the article is politically neutral. So why the Trump headline when each gets one paragraph?
Because Reason is libertarian cosplay?
I have long followed Ms de Rugy and her articles, but she needs to stop submitting her articles to Reason. If you go to her original article, you will see that it was written as a suggestion- “What a Real Pro-Worker GOP Would look like”. With that headline, the article makes sense. You understand that the critiques in the article are meant to show what the GOP SHOULD do.
But the Reason editors long ago decided that the last thing they could ever do is offer suggestions to those icky people on the Right. So they change the headline to spin the article as an attack on the GOP- an article that proves the GOP is clearly “anti-worker”. This of course make’s de Rugy’s article look unhinged, since many of its critiques are of Democrat policies, not GOP policies.
https://www.creators.com/read/veronique-de-rugy/07/24/what-a-real-pro-worker-gop-would-look-like
Until Reason makes some serious changes to its lazy editorial staff, that would rather generate outrage/amen clicks than offer coherent articles, de Rugy should keep her articles to herself. Because Reason is making her look really, really bad.
Thanks for pointing that out. Really not fair to the author to put it under a dishonest headline and not fair to readers either.
Thanks for laying blame where it belongs.
I’ve been reading her stuff here for going on 16 years. Now I have to wonder if her “slip” into abject idiocy and TDS is all because the headlines have framed the articles in a certain way.
Congrats KMW, really awe inspiring editorial leadership.
I should have smelled the KMW rat. Mea culpa for not being cynical enough.
Fire KMW.
Get out of DC.
Start thinking LIBERTY in every article, first and foremost. Practicality and utilitarianism are fine, but not by themselves.
Or, could it be that Trump's economic policies are awful? No... it couldn't be that. As the memes explain, Trump was chosen by Jesus to lead the country. It must be TDS.
Thanks for this. It never occurred to me that her articles were in multiple places.
I think the headlines are deliberately offensive to one party or the other to get more clicks. A 'neutral' headline won't drive eyeballs to a neutral article. Everyone wants to be able to say 'this is crap' or 'this is so true'. Emotional appeal.
Taxes are paid only by flesh-and-blood people, and corporations, well, are not people.
So much for Citizens United, then.
Weird flex.
Citizens United held that corporations are made up of people that don’t lose their 1A rights just because they form one.
I’m not seeing the flex.
Eh? Do you not understand that ALL business expenses are paid by customers, or at least investors who expect customers to pick up the tab eventually?
I subscribe to some liberal sites, and as a result get regular emails from them. I recently received an email from PublicCitizen.org. Now, PublicCitizen.org is a 501(c)(4) corporation, who’s primary purpose seems to be opposing the ruling handed down in the Citizens United case.
Recall that the Citizens United case hinged on the fact that a 501(c)(4) corporation produced a movie that had a political purpose, in this case a documentary “Hillary: The Movie” that was intended to highlight Mrs. Clinton’s shortcomings the first time she was running for president.
The email from Public Citizen was urging me to donate money to support their production of a documentary DVD highlighting how bad the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United was.
That’s right: a 501(c)(4) corporation made a movie with the express political purpose of protesting the Supreme Court decision that a 501(c)(4) corporation could make a movie with an express political purpose!
[recycled email of mine from 2016]
For years this group Public Citizen has pretended that they simply want to hold government accountable, and especially that they want to see Citizens United ruling overturned or obviated via Constitutional amendment. They kept saying they just wanted to get the corrupting influence of money out of politics. I've pointed out many times before that when they screamed about "millionaires and billionaires" like the Koch brothers funding conservative ideals, they never once complained about Tom Steyer or George Soros or Michael Bloomberg's spending, not once complained about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by unions to prop up Democratic candidates. I've also pointed out the irony that they are exactly the kind of group that Citizens United ruling enabled--a 501(c)4 corporation engaging in political speech.
Now they've stopped even pretending...
For many people it comes down to the local factory or mill or shipping center, and how they perceive how local (and personal) economics will be affected by political policies. At least populist GOP schemes promise jobs without also threatening drag queen story hour at the library.
I'll ignore the stupid and gratuitous swipe at Vance. His working class background was a matter of public record well before he entered politics.
That said, frankly, derision toward a pro-worker GOP might ring a little more plausible coming from an actually pro-worker libertarianism. Or at least a libertarianism not hellbent on supporting the interests of the managerial technocracy over the middle and working classes. It's hard for me to get real excited about the idea of removing occupational protections for a $25 an hour hairdresser when the government uses "disparate impact" to make hiring non-college grads too risky to consider. I have trouble getting behind letting millions of Third World migrants into the country, depressing worker wages, when the government twists IP law to grant permanent monopolies. Cramming houses together into semi-urbanism doesn't exactly excite me when the same libertarians advocating it want to whistle past the graveyard of the fact that the government is handing hundreds of billions to institutional investors who buy up those sardine cans and make people renters.
There's plenty that could be done to create a pro-working class and pro-middle class libertarianism. And those things would be entirely libertarian. But, they're difficult. It means saying things that will probably not win you a lot of friends on the Acela cocktail circuit. It means undermining the government privileges afforded the kind of people the Reason gang would rather be around.
Anyone who feels elite, and who promotes "policy", can't be libertarian. Period.
They need to get the fuck away from DC.
Yeah, should have cut the contributions the day Reason announced a DC office. Swamp-fever is contagious.
I tried searching for it, but couldn't find it. Where were the Reason offices located before moving to D.C.?
Media trying to erase that "working class background" with a "you didn't build that" attack.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-myth-that-j-d-vance-bootstrapped-his-way-to-the-top/ar-BB1qBRNF?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=0f275fc1fd944d309cc4905c1f47e1d9&ei=725
The Myth that J.D. Vance Bootstrapped His Way to the Top
His story still matters, though. Most notably because, while his memoir resonated with readers for its quintessentially American narrative of a self-made man, the reality is he did not get here alone. He got here because of the policies and programs that support working class people.
So really you have nothing regarding particular policy proposals from the GOP. Thanks, that was a big help.
Struggling to find any libertarian content or concepts in this WaPo article.
Resistance is futile.
What is Reason thinking? You can only criticize terrible policy if it comes from Democrats. Protectionism and top-down national industrial policy is perfectly fine if it comes from the GOP.
So what if the GOP has morphed in to 1980s Democrats? Still better than the other guys!
The 1980s Democrats look conservative compared to today's Democrats. None of them would get past the primaries.
Newsweek:
Former president Donald Trump's gains with Black voters have been eroded since Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and Vice President Kamala Harris became the expected Democratic nominee, according to polls.
First, every headline on every major news site for the last few days has been something like this. "Black woman great, orange man bad."
Second, how disappointing that skin color is the most important thing to some people.
>>their policies hurt the people they're supposed to help.
we already witnessed the policies and everything was fine.
And the "pro-worker" Democrat Party is really anti-worker, since they don't care how many workers lose their jobs to automation or failing businesses, as long as a few workers get paid more. Even if those somewhat higher wages are offset by everything costing more, due to the higher labor costs.
Cronyism has a market too. It is not limited to the US. It happens globally.
So, even if the US eliminated all corporate subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and other government-granted privileges, other nations wouldn't necessarily do the same. So, if china subsidizes some industry or other, the recipient of that subsidy might have a competitive advantage over entities that operate without and subsidy.
So, what to do then? Let US based corporations fail? Restrict trade with foreign entities that get foreign subsidies? Let foreign entities that get foreign subsidies just have the rest of the global market? DeRugy would probably say that trade can't be restricted with foreign entities that get foreign subsides. What follows from that is the US based corporations can't compete, or the move operations to lower labor costs, or they just close down. DeRugy makes it seem so easy, just eliminate Cronyism. But that doesn't work unless the entire international market does it too. DeRugy doesn't say how to make that happen.
I know! I know! Set 'fair share' taxes on foreign widgets so their plantation-slave-camps have to at least pretend to compete with a US taxed market ... or ... just get rid of all taxes period or at least to a point where they are insignificant.
Your "analysis" shows WILLFUL IGNORANCE. The people you accuse of being likely to increase corporate income tax are actually on record as supporting LOWER tax rates for everyone. That explicitly includes corporations.
Weird, because IM working class and I can remember when Trump was the President his policies were better form me and my family. Reason is just legacy media now full of TDS.