Election Day is just 46 days away (and early voting has started in Virginia!) but the question can still be asked: “What is this whole thing about anyway?”
Yes, there’s been a lot of bluster and noise from both sides, but how exactly should an informed citizen evaluate the policy proposals that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are promising to enact?
Once you take a look under the hood, the news is alarming.
“Next year is going to be a mess for U.S. fiscal policy,” writes Dominic Pino in one of the two cover stories for the new issue, “The Coming Budget Blowout.” In 2025, just as the new president takes office, “the individual provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the 2017 GOP tax cuts, expire. The suspension of income limits for Obamacare subsidies will end. The spending caps from the 2023 debt-limit deal will go away, and the debt limit will need to be raised again.”
What’s more, Pino writes, “the federal deficit is about $2 trillion right now, 6.3 percent of GDP, in peacetime during an economic expansion with low unemployment. It will be about $2 trillion again next year, and that’s if everything goes reasonably well. The national debt grows by $1 trillion roughly every 200 days.”
What do Trump and Harris have to say about confronting these problems? Nothing much or, at least, nothing serious. As Dominic lays out, each campaign has been busy describing new and novel ways to spend your money rather than talking about the prudent pruning of programs and initiatives that is desperately needed to put the nation’s finances in order.
Okay, well what about foreign policy?
As the United States faces an anti-American bloc of revanchist powers in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, and ongoing hot wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, and the Red Sea, neither Trump nor Harris “seems willing to acknowledge the world as it is,” writes Noah Rothman, “preferring instead one that their imaginations have conjured.” His essay is aptly titled “The Foreign-Policy Delusions of the 2024 Race.”
Unfortunately for Harris, “Hamas will not consent to its own destruction and submit itself to Israeli justice. Moreover, it has no interest in a ‘two-state solution.’ It does not seek to exist in cooperative harmony with the Palestinian factions that govern the West Bank, much less with Israel.” How would a President Harris navigate that reality?
Unfortunately for Trump, “failure in Ukraine could have severe consequences. A cessation of hostilities that leaves Moscow in control of the industrial regions in eastern Ukraine would leave the country more dependent on the West and more vulnerable to future Russian attacks. It would unnerve America’s NATO allies on the alliance’s frontier, some of whom would prepare to defend their own borders with or without America’s support or even input.” How would a restored Trump administration handle the fact that an immediate push to “end the war,” which Trump says is his goal, will result in an unambiguous victory for the Kremlin?
Unfortunately for Americans, “just as Harris dares not offend the sensibilities of some of the most aberrant elements of the American political landscape by backing Israel’s mission, Trump prefers to dance with the eccentrics” and pundits who have “convinced themselves that the victim of Vladimir Putin’s war was asking for it.”
Read both Noah and Dominic’s essays in the new issue of National Review magazine.
In it — among much else — you will also find:
- Jack Butler’s report from the Montana race between Jon Tester and Tim Sheehy that very well could decide who controls the Senate, “Big Sky Brawl.”
- An essay by Tal Fortgang on “Israel’s Bad-Faith Critics,” whose real goal is to delegitimize the Jewish state.
- Eminent historian Allen Guelzo’s review of Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849–1861, a new book by Robert W. Merry.
- Ross Douthat on Rebel Ridge — a movie that almost succeeds.
- And, in one of my favorite magazine essays of the year, Charlie Cooke and Luther Abel’s “Most Excellent Whizzbang American Roller-Coaster Adventure,” which took them coast to coast in search of America’s greatest roller-coaster theme parks.
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