But Christmas does not come in August. For the first week after the announced economic program we could hope that it did not foretell the economic policies of a Dole administration. Dole has committed himself to leaving Social Security, Medicare, veterans' programs, defense spending, and other sacred cows untouched at their currently-projected spending levels. There is not much of the government left. But the economic program proposes no policies that could possibly perform the miracle of nearly doubling the rate of productivity growth.
Productivity growth requires high rates of investment in capital, in knowledge, and in people.
There is nothing to improve education. Maintain the extra deficits in the Dole plan for a decade, and find that you have appreciably slowed growth, not boosted it. But there is one piece of good news in all this. The good news is that Candidate Dole has finished the process of refocusing Republican political rhetoric. It used to be that Republican political rhetoric glorified trickle-down economics and personal wealth, and denied even the existence of the wage stagnation, widening income inequality, and slow productivity growth that plagued the 1970s and 1980s.