Today The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed "by" Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar and general spokesperson for middle American big business. The content of his piece will not astonish you, but it is all very telling of the economic debate in this country, starting with the headline "A Centrist Agenda for Economic Growth: Freer trade plus lower corporate and investment taxes would go a long way." So, one conservative idea plus a second conservative idea equals a "centrist agenda?"
The actual list of bland platitudes is pretty similar: Don't tax corporate profits made abroad, adopt a flat tax, more free trade, tort reform, deregulate health insurance. Owens also calls for maintaining the Federal Reserve's political independence but doesn't say what is threatening that independence. I'm guessing a potential Fed audit is a little too esoteric, so I bet he's just concerned about interest rates as opposed to full employment, which is the general conservative concern.
The bill's non-conservative ideas? Infrastructure investment (good for a company that makes construction machines) and allowing foreign guest workers into the United States (good for a company in the construction industry). Also a hint at supporting a consumption tax on carbon emissions. The call for restoring "fiscal discipline" breaks even, since the only recent administrations to even gesture at fiscal discipline were of the left, but Owens specifically wants you to think we should adopt corporate accounting standards for Social Security. Putting aside that Social Security is not a ticking time bomb and corporate accounting standards are a sort of hyper-fiction where lies become true for the purposes of enabling other, larger lies, this is a great idea.
There are a couple of different ways we use the word "centrist." Primarily, we think of centrist as a compromise between ideas on the left and the right, like the health-care reform bill, which used free-market mechanisms, private actors, and government regulation to improve the health system -- neither an entirely government run program nor an entirely private one. Tax reform that broadens the base and eliminates loopholes while lowering rates would be centrist.
The other way is to make extreme ideas -- like the flat tax -- or ideas that primarily benefit a few special interests or the very wealthy -- flat taxes, more tax breaks for corporations -- acceptable to the broad populace. This op-ed could be called "A Conservative Agenda for Economic Growth" or "A Corporate Agenda for Economic Growth" without changing a word of it.
Divining an actual centrist agenda for growth is a good idea, though, if only to give both sides of the discourse something to frame their discussions around. It would include some of the things Owens gestures at -- further health-care reform, immigration reform, infrastructure investment -- but this is woefully lacking in a focus on education and income inequality.
However, I think all sides can agree that "we need to think like winners." That's definitely a big part of what's missing, America-wise, right now. We are thinking too much like tie-ers, or even losers, to have proper economic growth.
-- Tim Fernholz
