In the philosophically jumbled jungle that is American presidential politics in 2016, U.S. Senate Democrats now ponder working agreeably with President-elect Donald Trump on economic issues, if no others.
That's per a report in the New York Times, the world's greatest newspaper no matter what Trump says--and for the very reason that Trump says it isn't, meaning its investment in vigorous and uncowed inside reporting, analysis and commentary.
To the extent Trump's economic philosophy can be gleaned amid his megalomania, narcissism, bluster and nonsense, he seems at times populist and even mildly Keynesian, which Democrats once were.
Trump proposes pouring money into infrastructure mainly on the argument that our airports and roads and bridges are run-down. But the theoretical underpinning is traditionally Democratic and Keynesian. It means, at some risk of oversimplification, stimulating an idled or slow-growing economy, not by market reliance, but with a government influx of cash.
Why, yes, we could go for some of that, Democratic Senate sources were telling the Times last week.
New infrastructure spending combined with tax cuts, a Reaganesque supply-side notion Trump simultaneously embraces, would run up the deficit. That would install deficit hawks, not liberal Democrats, as the likeliest philosophical opponents of Trumpian economics--a phrase that, admittedly, bears a ring of absurdity.
Liberal Democrats don't like across-the-board tax cuts because they disproportionately favor the greatest sums of money on the already-pampered wealthiest. But they like middle-class tax cuts and low-income tax cuts. And they want offsetting tax increases on corporations, which Trump steadfastly opposes.
There ought to be common ground if the parties could make their jumbled way to it.
Meantime, Trump was closer than Hillary Clinton to traditional Democratic thinking, or labor-union thinking, on trade. Here Trump and Bernie Sanders were closer than Bernie and Hillary.
From the start, Trump decried NAFTA--Bill and Hillary's '90s-era and corporate-obliging trade agreement with Mexico and Canada--as unfairly harmful to American workers. Presumably he now intends to give six months' notice of renegotiation of that trade agreement to the two border-country partners.
His most natural U.S. Senate ally in that ought to be the liberal Ohio Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, a staunch Hillary supporter for the obvious transcendent reason that Trump was generally scary if accidentally on target on an occasional populist economic position of special interest to down-and-out Ohioans.
Alarming instability might arise from a re-opened NAFTA. But it's not the worst of Trump's ideas. And it's not a traditionally Republican one, but a traditionally Democratic one.
That brings us to a giant slice of the economy, meaning health care--to repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Spending for health care accounted for 17.5 percent of the gross domestic product last year.
I am reminded of a conversation I had in the spring with Bud Cummins, the former GOP congressional candidate and U.S. attorney who was Trump's Arkansas campaign chairman and now works on the Trump transition team in Washington.
An honest and mostly doctrinaire conservative, Cummins said at that time that Obamacare wasn't the worst thing in the world, and, in fact, a good try. But he said it simply was unaffordable. He said he'd sensed signals from Trump--merely signals--that, while Trump would repeal Obamacare, he was sensitive to its intent of universal or near-universal availability of care.
That signal was that Trump had said in a Republican debate that he wouldn't let sick Americans die in the street. Remarkably, that seemed to distinguish him from some of the other GOP candidates.
The biggest problem with repealing and replacing Obamacare is preserving the ban on denying health insurance to persons with pre-existing conditions and doing so without a mandate for everyone to buy insurance and fatten the pool.
Republicans want pre-existing conditions protected, but they despise mandates.
Most likely the attempted solution will be an incentive. That's because Republicans love incentives for behavior rather than dictates.
The incentive probably would work this way: There would be a defined open enrollment period to buy health insurance for the next year. Persons signing up during that period, even for what might be a newly authorized bare-bones policy, would be ensuring their right to maintain coverage year to year at a capped rate no matter what catastrophic condition might beset them.
Such a partial solution would leave the not inconsiderable matter of what to do about people declining to respond in the open-enrollment period and then getting, say, a rare cancer.
We'd presumably go back to absorbing those costs in all our premiums and hospital charges.
To conclude for today: A glimpse of populist and Keynesian economics and an aversion to letting sick people die in the street must pass at the moment for an encouraging word.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/20/2016