Trump’s Platform Takes Conservatism into the 21st Century

P resident Trump’s political opponents have been posting billboards and running political advertisements attacking the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and asserting that it is the Republican secret agenda. While many in the media have parroted this assertion, it is clearly false. There is nothing secret about President Trump’s agenda. Indeed, he unveiled at the Republican National Platform a detailed 20-step plan. There is no reason to hypothesize about a secret plan when a plan is there to be analyzed. The plan takes Reaganomics and modifies it for the 21st century.

The headline is that the former president will double down on the policies that delivered 3 percent growth and inflation below the Fed’s target of 2 percent. Critics of the president — for example, the 16 Nobel Prize–winners who assert he will be worse than Biden — face a difficult truth. It defies common sense that policies that were not inflationary a few years ago would suddenly become so today. What exactly has changed about the world so that the effect of supply-side policies would have an opposite effect today? Nothing, of course.

If one wants to attack inflation, one needs to increase supply. That basic thought is infused throughout the platform.

Focusing on the core supply-side policies first, the platform reveals plans to take the supply side tax cuts of 2017 and make them permanent, and then to add additional tax cuts into the mix. While critics might wail about the revenue costs of this, the platform takes that bold step despite the large Biden deficits because the tax cuts of 2017 did not rip a hole in the deficit. The 2017 CBO Long Run Budget Outlook, published before the tax cuts were passed, began with the observation that for the prior 50 years, revenues averaged 17.4 percent of GDP. The latest CBO estimate pegs revenues for 2024 at 17.5 percent of GDP. As Reagan knew, growth gave us higher revenue than the static scorekeepers expected. The new tax cuts will include an elimination of the tax on tip incomes, something that will be easy to regulate anti-fraud safeguards around, and that essentially treats the tip as a gift from the customer to the worker rather than a payment from the employer.

Small tax rates require small government, of course, and the platform recognizes the undeniable link between runaway government spending and inflation. While lacking specifics, it calls for a sharp reduction in government spending.

As would have been the case under President Reagan, the drafters of the platform go on to emphasize the importance of deregulation. For eight years under President Obama, and now almost four years of President Biden, agencies have vastly expanded federal dictates. The effect has been to reduce competition and increase prices to protect special interests. Large banks, trial lawyers, major health-insurance companies, union bosses, big tech companies, windmill installers, federal bureaucrats, and foreign drug manufacturers all hope that each rule’s price effect is small enough that citizens do not notice that they are being taken.

But the sum total of “pen and phone” governing is impossible to miss. Wages are no longer keeping up with inflation as has been widely noted. A big reason is that the costs of new regulations are enormous. According to a forthcoming study by one of us, Biden’s first-term regulations alone will cost the average household over $6,000 annually over the next decade if they are allowed to stand. This would result in everything from more expensive cars to higher internet prices to unaffordable utility bills.

The platform contains provisions for streamlined permitting processes and significantly expanded oil exploration to help put downward pressure on energy prices, reversing the veritable war on fossil fuels waged by the Biden administration and his Democratic allies in Congress. It advocates a reciprocal trade policy that set U.S. tariffs, which will have a floor, equal to the tariffs charged our producers by foreign trading partners. It advocates opening up some federal lands for the construction of new homes, which would put downward pressure on home prices.

Perhaps most innovative in the platform is the focus on 21st-century issues that Reagan-era economists never would have dreamed of. The platform includes promises to have the government take its hands off the crypto industry and allow individuals to have custody of crypto assets without government surveillance. It calls for a light hand on artificial-intelligence regulation, and, echoing Elon Musk, calls for what regulation does emerge to be “rooted in free speech and human flourishing.” Finally, the platform features a goal of having the government pave the way for expanded industrial development of nearby space.

Regulations and bloated government budgets don’t much bother the high-paid people in Washington who made them or the media elites that cover them. But high prices for necessities ranging from fuel to food cut deeply into the budget of households with more limited means. The agenda spelled out in the platform is a logical extension of President Trump’s first-term policies, and our expectation is that it would once again deliver solid GDP growth, increased real income growth, low inflation, and declining income and consumption inequality. Indeed, it doesn’t take rocket science or a Nobel Prize to understand, just a reference to supply and demand.