Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Economic policy should focus on economic issues
Economic policy should focus on economic issues
Jul 6, 2025 6:33 PM

With any new presidential es new policies. That’s part of the electoral calculus made by the American people every four years. Different presidents have different priorities. No one expects otherwise.

That said, it’s reasonable to anticipate certain consistencies. National security policy focuses on protecting America from foreign threats; its first priority is not gender equality. Similarly the Department of Energy’s main goal is to ensure that America has sufficient energy supplies; it’s not responsible for developing educational curricula.

In other words, there’s a natural division of labor that, notwithstanding potential overlaps, helps government officials concentrate on their specific responsibilities and establish who is accountable for what.

Which brings me to the Biden administration’s economic policies. If position and rhetoric of President Biden’s economic team is anything to go by, Bidenomics aspires to be focused as much upon addressing questions like racial disparities and climate change as on topics like growth, taxes, deficits, poverty, employment, etc., which traditionally fall under the economic policy umbrella.

Some progressive thinkers have even specified that they want the new administration’s economic policies to be filtered through what they call “an intersectional gender lens.” Broadly speaking, this means factoring in gender, race and ethnicity when designing economic policies, regardless of whether the topic is wages or infrastructure.

How much of the Biden administration’s economic rhetoric will amount to virtue-signaling to progressives as opposed to reflecting fundamental shifts in the framing of economic policy is yet to be seen. But there are two problems with taking economic policy in intersectional directions.

One is that it opens an already-wide door to trying to promote particular groups’ economic well-being through targeted, top-down government interventions. Historically speaking, it’s at best unclear whether such approaches have produced the anticipated results. There’s also evidence to suggest that such interventions have adverse unintended consequences.

Consider, for example, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. In Johnson’s own words, the goal was to use the federal government to “cure poverty,” especially among racial minorities. But as authors such as Amity Shlaes have argued, these interventions invariably had negative effects upon the very populations they were designed to help.

Among other things, they created disincentives to work and undermined long-established civil society networks which were quite effective at addressing some of poverty’s deeper causes (family dysfunctionality, substance addiction, etc.). Moreover, by the 1970s, the large bureaucracies created to implement these programs weren’t even hiding the fact that their priority had e self-preservation rather than the welfare of the groups they were ostensibly serving.

A second problem is mission drift. Economic policy has implications for vast spheres of human endeavor, ranging from defense to education. But there are some fundamentals that should remain top priorities for anyone engaged in designing and implementing any administration’s economic program.

One such priority is sustained wealth-creation. Without wealth-creation, it es difficult to enhance the economy’s ability to meet people’s economic wants and needs over the long term, let alone sustain employment.

Indeed, we can’t even begin to have serious discussions about distribution issues, unemployment and poverty unless we have ongoing economic growth. More equal distributions of a shrinking economic pie result over time, in diminishing returns for everyone — including, eventually, those on society’s margins.

More generally, it’s every economic policymaker’s responsibility to bring economic insights and issues to the forefront of policy discussions, not least because there are plenty of other government officials whose (often very expensive) priorities lie elsewhere.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire raison d’etre, for instance, is safeguarding the environment. Surely, however, there should be someone sitting on one of the Oval Office’s couches during a climate change discussion who’s courageous enough to highlight the significant economic costs associated with trying to achieve zero-emissions.

The Treasury secretary’s job is not to largely echo whatever her EPA colleague says. Instead, economic policy officials should be asking all those hard questions that people pursuing the realization of what the economist Thomas Sowell famously called “cosmic justice” (i.e., heaven on earth) don’t like answering. In fact, it’s precisely by pointing to realities like trade-offs, or reminding people that endlessly expanding deficits are unsustainable, or highlighting how excessive regulation incentivizes cronyism that economic policymakers make distinct contributions to political debates unlikely to be made by anyone else.

A society’s well-being obviously isn’t reducible to economics. Questions of freedom and justice go far beyond supply and demand. Nonetheless, economic policymakers should resist being reduced to handmaids to everyone else’s political agendas. Ironically, it’s through sticking to their lane that they are most likely to promote mon good.

This article originally appeared in The Detroit News on Jan. 31, 2021

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Taking Games Seriously
An article in yesterday’s NYT, “Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time,” by Clive Thompson, gives a good overview of the current trend in the video game industry, especially by nonprofits and activist groups, to create “serious games,” a movement which “has some serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’ educational potential.” “What...
Secular Universities in Decline?
In his New York Times column this week, Peter Steinfels has an insightful analysis of an intriguing and provocative new book by C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University. Those who study the history of American academia are familiar with the story of the secularization of universities as recounted expertly by Christian scholars such as George Marsden (The Soul of the American University) and James Burtchaell (The Dying of the Light), who decry the shunting of religion from...
Potty-Mouthed President
The amount of media attention over the past week’s devoted to President Bush’s utterance of a “naughty” word has been incredible. Maureen Dowd uses it as just one more bit of proof supporting her depiction of the president as a frat-boy, who “has enshrined his immaturity and insularity, turning every environment he inhabits — no matter how decorous or serious — into fortable frat house.” She writes, “No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of...
Connect the Energy Dots…
Today’s NYT editorializes: “a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply while holding only 3 percent of the reserves will never be able to drill its way to lower oil prices, much less oil independence.” You’ll often hear plaint that Americans use more than their fair share of the world’s oil. We’re addicted to it, some say. After all, so goes the reasoning, we have less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, but we “consume...
Environmental News Roundup
Juliet Eilperin, “Bush Pollution Curbs Are Rated Equal to Clinton’s: Science Panel Says Proposed Cap-and-Trade System Will Help Clean Air,” Washington Post, July 24, 2006: The report from the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, represents the latest effort to assess how best to reduce air pollution estimated to cause as many as 24,000 premature deaths each year. The panel concluded that an earlier Bush plan would have allowed pollution to increase over a dozen years, but it found that...
Federal Funding for the Humanities
Hunter Baker, blogging at his new home on the American Spectator Blog (recently added to our blogroll), responds to a post by James G. Poulos, which emphasizes President Bush’s “proposed emphasis on math and science education, to the patent detriment of the humanities.” Says Baker, “Although I am a faithful disciple of the humanities, I often fort in the fact that the majority of students won’t have much exposure to the offerings on hand. Better they remain busy with their...
Original Sin
Headline: It’s a Sin to Fly, Says Church Actually, "It’s a Sin to Fly, Screams Headline" would be more appropriate. Here’s what the Church (or rather, the Bishop of London) actually says: “Making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin. Sin is not just a restricted list of moral mistakes. It is living a life turned in on itself where people ignore the consequences of their actions.” I think there’s...
Seek Dignity? Then, “You Gotta Shake Your MoneyMaker”
The Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump No, we’re not talking about Elmore James’ Blues hit covered by the likes of George Thorogood, Fleetwood Mac and The Black Crowes nor its racy subject matter. Rather, it’s how members of the other oldest profession in Kenya and Tanzania power the irrigation pumps that extend both their growing season and range of crops. This foot-powered move beyond subsistence farming to much more profitable harvests, such as vegetables, is facilitated by the aptly named MoneyMaker series...
More on Secularism and Universities
Just a brief note addition to Kevin’s post: the free article from May’s Touchstone magazine is Terence O. Moore’s feature, “Not Harvard Bound.” A key quote: The elite schools no mand the reverence and deference of red-state America. The parents and students of “flyover country” are starting to put their money where their morals are or where they believe truth is. There’s a discussion of Moore’s article at Touchstone‘s reader discussion site, Treaders. HT: Mere Comments ...
Beyond Black and White: New Realities of Race In America – BUMPED: Video now available
Anthony Bradley delivers his remarks last Wednesday The 2006 Acton Lecture Series continued today with Anthony Bradley’s presentation of Beyond Black and White: New Realities of Race In America. Mr. Bradley is an Acton research fellow and assistant professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. His lecture describes the new market trends which reflect the changing demographics in America. With a decline in population amongst whites, a stagnated black population, and the ever-increasing...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved