Nikki Haley's Gamble of Telling Republican Voters the Truth
Yesterday I read in National Review that in the course of what it sounds like was a blistering speech in New Hampshire, condemning Bidenomics for failing taxpayers and consumers, Nikki Haley rolled out her “economic freedom plan.”
Curiously unlike the other supposedly conservative candidates, as she does everywhere she goes, she blasted the ninety million demoralized Americans depending on Medicaid, and the forty million subsisting on food stamps, compounding inflation and costing taxpayers billions, since Biden waved state eligibility requirements for government assistance under the pretext of the national public health emergency.
In “Haley Reminds Republicans They Can’t Do Statist Economics Better than Democrats,” Noah Rothman recaps,
Biden’s economy, she continued, is defined by soaring prices, which are a response to profligate government efforts to sustain a massive welfare state. Forty-two million Americans are on food stamps, she observed in horror. More than 100 million Americans are on welfare. All told, nearly one-third of all Americans survive on government assistance. What’s more — from the “grossly misnamed” Inflation Reduction Act to the American Rescue Act — the Democratic Party under Joe Biden has paired “regular welfare” for American citizens with a regime of corporate welfare for its biggest economic actors.
“Add it all up, and Joe Biden has created a political-subsidy economy,” she said. “That’s what ‘Bidenomics’ really is: the government taking money from the middle class and giving it to everyone else.” That, Haley continued, is “called socialism. And as history shows, socialism killed the middle class.”
Then she seized the moment to go after populist Republicans who have succumbed to the delusions of industrial policy and massive federal spending, too, in lockstep with the progressive left. Take the ridiculous Railway Safety Act, for instance, just a load of crony union pork pushed by populist Republicans like JD Vance, or Trump’s farm subsidies, or Trump’s Paycheck Protection Program.
“We hear similar foolishness from some Republicans,” the governor observed. “They want so-called industrial policy that bails out railroad unions or promotes the misnamed ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ That’s little more than socialism lite.”
Haley decried the “insulting” extent to which the “big government” right and left alike express their lack of faith in the American people. They tell mothers to be “dependent” on the beneficence of the state. They tell college kids to take on debt with the understanding that taxpayers will save them from the consequences of their actions. They tell business owners to “chase subsidies” rather than to “do well by doing good.” And their philosophy is destined to fail as it has failed so reliably before. “Republicans used to know that giving Washington more control isn’t the solution. It’s the problem,” she maintained. “Government always breaks more than it fixes.”
Haley invoked an economic freedom plan that would involve first vetoing any legislation that doesn’t return us to preCovid spending levels, ending earmarks, reversing Biden’s clean energy subsidies, and most notably raising the retirement age for young people to ensure that entitlements, Medicare and Social Security, don’t go bankrupt. Taking shots at DeSantis and Trump, she added that anyone who would promise to do nothing about entitlements will “take your vote and leave you broke.” Echoing her infamous line that “a vote for Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris,” she said hilariously that “Biden doesn’t care about entitlements going broke in ten years, because he’s not going to be here in ten years.” I love her tactless insistence by the way that Biden is somehow, sooner or later going to be dead. Cracks me up.
I don’t see what’s not to like about her. Nikki Haley is antigovernment, pro-work, pro-law and order, pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel, and pro-FREEDOM. For God’s sake. The more I listen to her, the more I think she is literally everything America needs, namely in terms of foreign and fiscal policy. It doesn’t have to be her, as I would be down for any Republican or a Democrat who puts Ukraine and pension reform at the top of one’s agenda. Those are the top priorities for me, as they should be for any serious conservative leader or even a center left one. Supporting Ukraine to win and getting deficits under control should be a nonpartisan matter of existential urgency, however unfortunately in this day and age, they are rather vexingly polarizing issues to take any stand on, let alone a stand as resolute as Nikki Haley has taken.
Indeed, conservative Thatcherite government is what America needs now. Government spending is out of control, pensions are going bankrupt and our enemies, Russia, China, and Iran are seeking alternately to build empires, build nuclear bombs, and weaponize international energy markets. And what America doubtless needs is a traditional, in many ways just a conventional conservative administration. And Nikki Haley is the most commonsense alternative—perhaps the best out of a gallery of flawed options—who will confront our enemies, rather than seek to appease them, like Biden absurdly paying Iran billions to enrich uranium, intentionally undersupplying Ukraine, and seeking to secure a deal with Xi over climate change, and worst of all betraying Afghan allies, women and girls to Jihadi slavery all for the sake of ending “forever wars” for his extremely, psychopathically, misguided partisan gain; or, regarding Trump, to seek detente with Russia or pull out of NATO, or God knows what.
That’s because Haley sees our enemies as they are. Moreover Nikki Haley promises: to help Ukraine achieve victory over Russia, not just to aid them “as long as it takes;” also to deter Xi from invading Taiwan and blockading the South China Sea, as well as contain China’s technological advances; and contain Iran with snapback UN sanctions combined with the threat of military force— all while reducing deficits by capping spending, reforming welfare, and getting pensions on a sound footing, lowering the cost of living by extending the Trump tax cuts, and cutting regulations to ensure a stable supply of energy.
She is the most intelligent if not the frankest, presidential candidate, fiscally self-aware and defense hyperconscious, whose message is to make America strong and proud, as opposed to Biden’s message of weakness and retrenchment, and Trump’s downright unAmerican defeatism. While her economic policy is to stimulate growth, her foreign policy is explicitly about “preventing war.”
In addition I think that upon coming into office, she would be well advised immediately to complete Trump’s Keystone pipeline, end normal trade relations with China until they stop the manufacture of precursor chemicals going into Fentanyl (as she promises), and perhaps even a preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could be a magisterial reassertion of power like Thatcher’s Falklands War. Rather than retreat from the world instead to make dewy-eyed sermons about the international rules-based order and consolidate “our democracy,” even while we betray democracy in Afghanistan and currently undermine Ukraine— Nikki Haley could assert American unipolar hegemony in the world again, countering Russian and Chinese influence everywhere, with coercive diplomacy, sanctions and targeted strikes.
Her campaign poses a profound test of our national self-belief during a time of such anxiety and uncertainty, it’s as if we would rather believe in lies so long as they gratified convenient assumptions. Haley presents an opportunity for redemption— that reality, like it or not, can no longer be avoided.
— Jay
This was yesterday. In the second half, she talks to some conservative kids and makes some good points about spending and immigration.
The editors give a favorable analysis on the latest episode of the WSJ’s Potomac Watch podcast.