DeSantis’s Unstable Economic Fusion

Ron DeSantis is trying to recharge his 2024 campaign, and his economic speech in New Hampshire on Monday was a reasonable place to start. Offering voters a substantive agenda, while talking about Florida’s successes, is a more presidential look than brawling with Disney.

Mr. DeSantis wants the U.S. to aim for 3% growth, which is a good and achievable target, and his agenda lays out policies to get there. The best way to help all Americans, especially those with lower incomes, is with policies that support faster growth and stable prices, so that real incomes rise. President Biden’s failure on that front is one of his chief vulnerabilities.

Mr. DeSantis’s economic plan calls for “ambitious tax and regulatory reform,” including making permanent “full immediate expensing” for businesses. Ditto for today’s tax rates on personal income. The 2017 tax law’s provisions on both are scheduled to expire during the next President’s term.

To his credit, Mr. DeSantis doesn’t fall for the Beltway fad of right-wing income redistribution via the tax code, such as child tax credits. This would do nothing for growth and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Instead he says he’d simplify the tax code further, while purging “K Street carveouts and loopholes.” This is the right instinct, though we await specifics.

The agenda assails “profligate federal spending that has inflated prices and plunged our nation to the brink of insolvency.” It says Mr. DeSantis’s appointee to lead the Federal Reserve would “focus on maintaining a stable dollar instead of the political pressures of the day.” Stable money is essential to rising incomes, and GOP candidates should make it the basis for any economic program.

Mr. DeSantis wants to “mandate work requirements for welfare programs,” which is especially needed after the rolls multiplied during Covid. He’d also unleash U.S. energy production, as all the GOP candidates would. Education is another strong point, one that resonates with his record in Florida. The plan says he’d “support school choice nationwide,” while focusing on vocational education and apprenticeships.

As for college, he wants to stop government subsidies for “useless degrees” by making “universities, not taxpayers, responsible for the loans their students accrue.” Less helpfully, he’d make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. This looks designed to compete for the youth vote with Mr. Biden’s debt forgiveness, but it would encourage more debt.

Mr. DeSantis undercuts his growth message with other policies that appear driven by politics instead of economics. While assailing carveouts in the tax code, he calls for bringing U.S. capital back from China with the help of “strategic tax abatements.” Mr. DeSantis’s program also adopts Donald Trump’s unjustified alarmism about “our ever-increasing trade deficits.” The trade deficit with China has been falling.

He promises to “create a fair labor market,” including by “limiting unskilled immigration.” But unemployment is at record lows in many states. In New Hampshire, it’s 1.8%. The problem at the moment is too many unfilled jobs. By the way, immigrants were “the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022,” according to a recent study. Good luck getting to 3% economic growth if the workforce is shrinking.

Sometimes Mr. DeSantis sounds like an optimistic believer in economic freedom, arguing that the way to produce broad prosperity is to get government out of the way. With the next breath, he’s a Trumpian who wants industrial policy, speaks ominously of “large corporations,” and pits the middle class against “elites.” The Governor is trying to advance conservative policy while simultaneously appealing to Mr. Trump’s base. It’s the kind of fusionism that would have taxed Robert Oppenheimer.

The best of Mr. DeSantis’s agenda highlights his appeal as a successful Governor who knows good policy and can deliver results. But to sell it he’ll have to focus more on growth than on grievance. He needs a vision for American renewal that transcends Mr. Biden’s plans to use big government for income redistribution and Mr. Trump’s desire to use it for political “retribution.” What made Florida’s economy great wasn’t “strategic tax abatements.”