Judd Gregg: Democrats’ banal deal

With little gusto and virtually no discernible enthusiasm, Democratic congressional leaders presented their manifesto of purpose last week.  

They called it “The Better Deal.” They should have called it “The Banal Deal.”

One presumes that in naming this collection of thread-worn policies they were trying to play off President Trump’s “Art of the Deal.” Or maybe they were trying to take us all back in time to The New Deal. In any case, the title was as trite as the initiatives that appeared beneath it.

{mosads}The proposal was a collection of failed, unimaginative, “big government knows best” ideas. Its roots are the themes of anger and populist discontent most prominently articulated by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

It seems to escape the notice of the leadership of the Democratic Party that Sanders is not a Democrat. He is a socialist — as is Ms. Warren, although she does not have the integrity to claim the title.

Socialism is not a workable form of government, as was unquestionably proven by the Soviet Union in the last century and Venezuela and Cuba in this century.

It leads to a lower standard of living for all, justified in the name of attacking the few who have succeeded. It is envy politics.

Even where less virulent forms of it have been practiced, such as France, it has led to the lowering of the economic health of the people and the nation.

But this inglorious history has not prevented socialism from being embraced by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in their quest to find something to justify their party beyond opposition to Trump.

The Better Deal calls for an agency referred to as a “National Trust Buster.”

Presumably the numerous federal agencies charged in part with controlling monopolies and excess concentrations of power in the private sector — a group that includes the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — are not enough.  

The Better Deal now calls for another bureaucracy to oversee all the existing agencies, many of which were created by Democratic congresses in the first place.

A black letter rule for Warren, a former law professor, and her colleagues is that there can never be enough government management of the private sector.  

Ironically, the Democratic leadership’s concern about concentration of economic power does not extend to the so-called FANG group of technology titans: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

This obvious oversight may have something to do with political fundraising in the Democratic-friendly gold fields of Silicon Valley.

The Better Deal then paused on healthcare. The proposal in this arena would more accurately be entitled “The Old Drug Deal.”

The only element of healthcare the proposal takes on is pharmaceutical producers. The folks who make the drugs that save lives and reduce the need for invasive medicine once again are the targets of the populist left. They are easy targets, of course, due to a few bad actors.   

But one does wonder, if the socialist approach to the pricing of drugs is put in place, how there will be an incentive to produce new medications, which make life better for many people.

How do you raise the funds needed to produce drugs that take a great deal of lead-time and tremendous amounts of risk capital in a price-controlled world? The answer is, you do not. Fewer breakthrough medications will be the result.    

But this point has never tempered the claim of those who wish to control the market in the name of collectivist economics.

Added to these banalities are a series of equally questionable ideas that are neither new nor good.

There is, for example, a call once again to raise the national minimum wage to a point where employers will be truly incentivized to use automation and technology instead of people with low skills or part-time needs.

It is extremely discouraging that the party in opposition is so devoid of creativity. Time and again, it turns to folks who distrust and dislike the market economics that have made Americans uniquely successful.

This is not the party of Harry Truman or John Kennedy, or even of Bill Clinton.  

This is a tired group of people who have allowed themselves to be coopted by charlatans of the left with ideas that have failed miserably whenever they were tried.    

To be guided by the purveyors of the radical left is to admit that, as a party, Democrats have abandoned those who believe in the American dream; people who want only to obtain a better life for themselves and their children.

The Better Deal is a self-inflicted wound, an admission that Democrats seem to have no one among them who sees the greater good of America.   

This nation needs a Democratic Party that connects with people as they move forward; a party that expresses optimism in our nation’s uniqueness and does not weigh it down with failed ideas from other cultures and times.

Right now, it does not have it.

Judd Gregg (R) is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee.