David Stockman's Contra Corner
March 29, 2024
When John F. Kennedy chose his running mate in 1960, he was not in the ideological check-the-box business. He was in the race to win, and to do that he needed the 26 electoral votes of Texas and to retain as many of the 101 electoral votes in the rest of the historic "Solid South" as possible.
Needless to say, leading Democrat contenders for the VP nod like Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson or Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman checked the liberal boxes with fying colors. But when it came to the electoral votes of Texas or Alabama, not so much.
As it happened, JFK choose Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. The latter delivered his home state by hook and/or crook, and also helped JFK salvage much of the Solid South before it disappeared into today's red state wall in 1968 and afer. Still, Nixon won 43 electoral votes there, while independent Harry Byrd siphoned of another 15 votes in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
That lef JFK with just 43 electoral votes in the Solid South and an overall margin in the Electoral College that was therefore far closer than suggested by his 303 to 219 win over Nixon. In fact, had Texas gone to Nixon and another 9 electoral votes in the Solid South shifed to Nixon or Byrd, JFK would have been deprived of an Electoral College majority (269 votes), thereby likely forcing the election into the US House of Representatives for the frst time since 1824.
Needless to say, in choosing his running mate RFK was in the same position his uncle had been in 64 years ago. He didn't need to check any ideological boxes because his core platform was already crystal clear: Bobby Kennedy is the anti-Uniparty candidate who can liberate America's constitutional democracy from the crony capitalist grip of the War Party, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley and the rest of the beltway bandits- all of whom have prospered mightily during decades of Forever Wars and unspeakable fnancial windfalls to the 1%, even as main street America has withered on the economic vine.
Yet while his platform is clear and solid, his route to victory as a third-party independent is murky, at best. And also, is far more complex than the strategy of salvaging the Solid South employed by JFK.
To wit, we see no practical route to an RFK victory via a standard majority of the votes in the Electoral College. But unlike 1960, the prospect of a hung jury in the Electoral College, and therefore election of the next President in the U.S. House of Representatives, is considerable, indeed.
Accordingly, RFK's path to the White House needs to encompass three crucial objectives:
- Assurance of an Electoral College outcome in which neither Biden nor Trump get 270 votes.
- Obtaining at least a few Electoral College votes outright in order to be among the top three candidates put before the US House per the 12th Amendment procedure.
- Formation of state-by-state coalitions in the House of Representatives in January 2025 among disafected Democrats and Republicans in order to gain the requisite 26 votes under the constitutional procedure in which each state delegation gets one vote, and which vote may be cast regardless of who won the election in the state.
As it happens, we are not sure which policy boxes Nicole Shanahan checks, but we do think she might well be a brilliant choice when it comes to the three-step election strategy enumerated above. That's because she's young, idealistic, tech-savvy, a living embodiment of the American Dream, the spawn of a hard-scrabble immigrant family and a refugee from the Washington-based Democratic party that has lost its way.
Yes, we are not especially enamored with her bit about purifying the soil or the whackadoo district attorney in Los Angeles that she apparently supported under the banner of justice reform. But libertarians need remember that America's jails are overfowing with victims of Washington's idiotic War on Drugs and a whole array of other Nanny State crimes including crossing the border illegally because the Washington-prescribed legal quota for work permits for unskilled labor is laughably tiny (@ 4,500 per year).
So an ample and orderly Guest Worker program, justice reform and clearing out the jails of millions of nonviolent perpetrators of victimless crime is the very essence of shrinking Big Government and getting the state out of our lives. And that mission especially extends to the Deep State's assault on free speech and suppression of dissent from UniParty orthodoxies.
There is no doubt that RFK is on the right side of all of these issues and that he will battle the real threat to "law and order" in America, which is the Democrat-driven weaponization of the machinery of justice and the horrible over-reach of the FBI, CIA and other Deep State institutions. And as far as we can tell, Nicole Shanahan is fully on board with that crucial agenda.
Still, RFK has to win the election frst, and a re-run of the 2020 election results with just two changes tells you why his VP pick might help make that happen. These include-
a shif of 22,300 votes in Arizona and Georgia away from Biden, representing just 0.014% of the 158.4 million votes cast in the 2020 presidential election.
a shif 15 electoral college votes from say New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada to a third party candidate.
The result would have been 264 electoral votes for Biden, 259 votes for Trump and 15 votes for the third-party candidate. All candidates having thus fallen short of the 270-vote requirement in the Electoral College, of course, the election would have gone to the U.S. House of representatives.
So the question recurs. Has the red state versus blue state fracture of the nation's polity eased materially or even at all since 2020? Is it conceivable that all other things equal, RFK could capture Biden's 22,256 vote margin of victory in Arizona and Georgia out of the 4.145 million Biden votes cast in these two states?
Actually, we'd put money on it. Biden's razor thin margin was barely one-ffh of the 114,000 votes received in those two states by the hapless candidate of the Libertarian Party, Jo Jorgenson, and only 0.27% of the total 8.4 million votes cast for president in Arizona and Georgia
According to exit polls, Biden won overwhelming margins of 60% to 85% among young, independent, women, minority and Hispanic voters in these two lynch-pin states. These now sorely disillusioned Dem constituencies, of course, were tailor-made for RFK's platform and appeal, and now Nicole Shanahan's presence on the ticket adds a powerful reinforcement to that appeal.
The more compelling conclusion, therefore, is that it's hard to see how Biden could possibly win Arizona and Georgia again in 2024 with the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket in the race and bearing down hard on Biden's lopsided vote among traditional Dem constituencies in these (and other) states.
2020 Arizona Presidential Vote (11 Electoral Votes):
Biden: 1,672,143.
Trump: 1,666,686.
Biden margin: +10,457.
Jorgenson: 51,465.
2020 Georgia Presidential Vote (16 Electoral Votes):
Biden: 2,473,633.
Trump: 2,461,854.
Biden margin: 11,799.
Jorgenson: 62,299.
Indeed, pulling traditional Dem voters out of the Biden column in these battleground states is so crucial that the wealthy Ms. Shanahan might wish to purchase second homes in each of them and campaign there heavily for the duration! And that admonition might well extend to Wisconsin as well, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes out of the 3.2 million cast there in 2020.
Then again, if the race goes to the U. S. House RFK needs to be among the top three electoral vote getters according to the 12th Amendment, which means picking up at least a few electoral votes outright. As a matter of ultra fne-tuned targeting, there are actually two electoral votes in Maine and three in Nebraska that are awarded by Congressional district regardless of the statewide popular vote outcome.
Moreover, among these are the second district of Maine and the second district of Nebraska, which were divided nearly 50/50 on a red/ blue basis in the 2022 Congressional elections. So, possibly, some additional second homes for Nicole!
Another possibility is for the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket to pick-of 15 electoral votes on a whole state basis in New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico, or in other smaller states to be targeted by their campaign. The political math is not entirely prohibitive in any of these cases, either.
For instance, the message from the 2024 presidential primaries in New Hampshire was pretty straight forward. Of the state's voting age population of 1,150,000, just 169,000 or 14.7% voted for Trump and only 134,000 or 11.7% voted for Nikki Haley. Then again, the great preponderant majority, 847,000 voters or 74%, voted in the democratic primary or didn't vote at all, and some of these are presumably ripe for the taking in the general election.
The fact is, the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket can win legions of disillusioned voters from both the Dem and GOP columns in New Hampshire. They can also put a heavy efort into registering large numbers of previous non-voters who might be responsive to a truly formidable ticket and message in opposition to both wings of the UniParty status quo.
Assuming that the new RFK voter registrants might add say 2.5% to the state's total, the turnout next November would be about 850,000. So the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket would likely need about 35% or 300,000 votes to win the state's four electoral votes.
And there is no great mystery as to where these 300,000 voters might come from. That is to say, the 2020 Democrat primary proved in spades that Joe Biden is far from beloved in the Granite State.
In fact, the votes cast for Bernie Sanders (76,384), Pete Buttigieg (72,454), Amy Klobuchar (58,714) plus Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick totaled 269,720. That was nearly eleven times more than the 24,944 primary election votes garnered by Joe Biden. And that was even before he had become today's 81-year old semi-incapacitated "Joe Biden".
Furthermore, with respect to the Republican side, it only needs be remembered that during the 2012 New Hampshire GOP primary, Ron Paul got 25% of the vote against the War Party's trio of Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich. So there are a lot of libertarian-leaning, fscally conservative Republicans in the state that are available, too.
Afer all, the 2024 GOP candidate defled the constitution with his lockdowns and made a mockery of the Republican brand on fscal matters by adding more to the public debt ($8 trillion) than did the frst 43 US presidents combined during the initial 216 years of the nation's history. These Ron Paul anti-war, anti-debt voters thus also need a home, and the Kennedy/Shanahan peace ticket could provide exactly that.
Indeed, in a state teeming with Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul voters and numerous variants in between not named Trump or Biden, the team of Bobby and Nicole should literally resemble kids in a candy store, overwhelmed with the tasty opportunities.
In the case of Nevada, the 2020 exits polls tell you all you need to know. Whereas Biden won the state by a slim 50% to 48% overall margin against Trump, Biden got huge margins among constituencies that are naturally in Bobby Kennedy's wheelhouse, but also voters with whom Nicole Shanahan could, again, provide some extra punch. These big Biden margins included:
- 80% of the black vote.
- 61% of the Hispanic vote.
- 63% of voters under 29 years.
- 58% of those between 30 and 44 years.
- upwards of 70% to 90% of voters who cast their vote for Biden mainly because they were extremely negative about Donald Trump.
In 2024, all of these sub-groups would be up for grabs and the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket should be well positioned to capture them in droves.
Again, the likely total vote in the state during 2024 will be about 1.4 million, meaning that a 35% margin or 490,000 votes could win Nevada's six electoral votes.
In the case of New Mexico's fve electoral votes, the math is similar. About 925,000 votes are likely to be cast in November, meaning that a 35% margin for Kennedy/Shanahan would total about 320,000 votes. The math to get there might consist of 30% of Trump's 402,000 votes in 2020 and 40% of Biden's 502,000 votes.
Could that many votes be peeled of?
On the Dem side, the 2020 exit polls again point the way. Among voters 44 years or younger, 60% voted for Biden versus his 54% overall margin.
Likewise, 62% of independents and 57% of women voters supported Biden. Of equal signifcance, among voters who believed the economy was in poor shape, 76% voted for Biden.
Moreover, when it comes to Shanahan's side of the ticket, it is notable that 61% of those who believed we need sweeping reform of the criminal justice system voted for Biden. And that was along with an 89% Biden vote among those who opposed Trump's border wall and a 90% vote among those who had a negative view of Donald Trump himself.
All of these voters obviously could be stripped away from the far less formidable "Joe Biden" of 2024.
At the same time, signifcant parts of the GOP grass roots electorate remain strong fscal and economic conservatives in New Mexico, as well as in most other parts of red county America. Accordingly, they could be moved into the Kennedy/Shanahan column by the sharp contrast between Kennedy's pro-balanced budget position and the spending and debt bacchanalia that occurred on Donald Trump's watch during 2017 to 2020.
In all, the above review encompasses a minimum shif of just 1,100,000 voters to RFK in the fve highlighted states out of about 160 million votes which will be cast in the nation as a whole in 2024. That's about 0.7% of the electorate, and that's surely doable under the dire circumstances that currently confront the nation and in the context of a Biden vs. Trump choice that 70% of voters deplore.
In fact, RFK's platform of non-intervention abroad and fscal retrenchment at home could appeal to millions of disillusioned GOP voters. At the same time, his forthright attacks on crony capitalism and the Fed's coddling of Wall Street and the rich, his advocacy of a secure border with a wide gate and call for a revival of jobs and growth on main street would also resonate with anti-Trump Democrat constituencies.
This resulting shif in just fve states would satisfy the frst objective stipulated above and throw the election into the US House for the frst time in 200 years. But, alas, that assumes the outcomes in the other 45 states plus DC would be the same.
Ironically, the potential fy in the ointment for RFK is not so much that some 2020 red states would go blue for Joe Biden, but that three purplish states-Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania-which Biden won by a hair in 2020 could fip back to Trump, who won them in 2016.
As it happened, Biden won Wisconsin by the aforementioned 20,000 votes or 0.6% of the 3.2 million cast. Likewise, his victory margin in Pennsylvania was just 81,000 or 1.2% and in Michigan he won by 159,000 or only 2.9%.
Along with the potential Arizona and Georgia shif to Trump owing to the Kennedy draw from Biden voters as described above, grabbing either Pennsylvania or Michigan in addition would put the Donald back above the 270 vote Electoral College threshold. And that's even if New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico went for Kennedy/Shanahan.
The Kennedy/Shanahan campaign, therefore, must also resolutely chisel away at Trump's support among economically conservative GOP voters in these three additional battleground states-thereby keeping them in the Biden column so that the 12th Amendment would then come into play.
As we have previously suggested, here are some of the high points RFK would need to emphasize in order to block any Trump gains in these additional battleground states:
- Sweeping fscal retrenchment and a plan for slashing defense spending and balancing the Federal budget. (Note to Bobby: Just say it, the Harvard economics professors are going to denounce you anyway!)
- Clearing the Border of the current scary chaos via a Guest Worker program administered from US consulates in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere, not via the current insanity of forcing job-seeking migrants to illegally cross the border in order to get arrested and into the asylum processing cue.
- Ending the Forever Wars and Washington's disastrous global hegemony with an opposite policy of Fortress America. The latter could be funded at half the current defense budget or by what we have called the Eisenhower Minimum of $400 billion, which was the purchasing power of the defense budget at the peak of the Cold War in 2023 dollars; and which General Eisenhower thought was more than adequate for national security when he warned about the military-industrial complex in 1961.
- A constant reminder that Trump crushed property rights, individual liberty and even the freedom to worship during the Lockdowns, and fooded the US economy with trillions of infationary free stuf to tens of millions of people who didn't need it.
Indeed, small government Republicans need to hear over and again from RFK a very important truth: Namely, that Donald J. Trump is a fake economic conservative who will only further impair the cause of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity if he is returned to the Oval Ofce.
Accordingly, there is only one possible way to arrest the fow of history into the very bad place it is now heading via the farce of Trump v. Biden, and from which there is likely no return. To wit, RFK must attract sufcient numbers of economic conservatives in the battleground states to help ensure gridlock in the Electoral College, and to then help him pull a rabbit out of the hat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
As it happens, this third strategic objective may not be quite as implausible as it sounds. If for the frst time in exactly 200 years the selection of the President were to be thrown into the U. S. House, California and Wyoming would count as equals via the novel but constitutionally prescribed method of voting en bloc by state delegation.
The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.
The above is the full extent of the 12th Amendment process, meaning that the battle for the requisite 26 states would be a wide-open political free-for-all as between the top three candidates-Biden, Trump and Kennedy. As mentioned above, within each of the 50 state delegations there is no requirement that House Members vote for the candidate who won their state or to even vote for the nominee of their own party.
At the present time the House of Representatives is nearly evenly divided between the parties-with 27 delegations having a GOP majority, 21 having a Dem majority and two evenly split. And among the 23 smaller states with U. S. House delegations of fve or fewer Members, and which are likely to loom large in the contest, the breakdown is:
- twelve all red delegations (e.g. Oklahoma with 5 Republicans), including six state delegations consisting of only one or two Republican Members.
- eight all blue delegations (e.g. Hawaii with 2 Democrats) including four state delegations consisting of only one or two Democrat Members.
- three mixed delegations (Nevada, Mississippi and Kansas).
These confgurations could obviously change depending upon the 2024 House elections, but given the extreme degree of red state/blue state gerrymandering afer the 2020 Census, the current breakouts are not likely to change appreciably.
Consequently, as the candidate likely to have the fewest electoral votes going into the contest in the U.S. House, RFK's only route to victory would be to leap above the current red versus blue partisan confgurations and seek to coalesce ad hoc majorities among traditional Kennedy Democrats and GOP economic conservatives within the delegations of 26 target states.
Again, Nicole Shanahan should prove to be a valuable assist in keeping traditional Kennedy Democrats in the fold by helping to counter the brutal attacks of Kennedy family members who are on the DNC payroll, as well as the Washington Democrat apparatus facing the prospect of being frmly and fnally defenestrated in the halls of power.
For instance, Michigan is currently split 7 to 6 on a blue/red basis. So to line-up the seven-vote margin that would be required to win the Michigan delegation, RFK would likely need to obtain several Dem votes from rustbelt and/or minority-represented districts in southeastern Michigan, perhaps matched up with several outstate GOP Members who are strong economic conservatives per the Gerald Ford/Robert Taf form of midwestern Republicanism that has long prevailed in the Grand Rapids and western areas of the state. Many of these counties in recent times elected solid economic conservatives such as Reps. Justin Amash and Bill Huizenga and back in the day, of course, were the bedrock of our own terms in the U.S. Congress.
While a tall order, we can think of no better combo to double-team the Michigan House delegation than Kennedy and Shanahan.
Likewise, Pennsylvania is currently split 9 to 8 on a blue/red basis, North Carolina is aligned 7 to 7 and the blue/red split in Virginia is 6 to 5. In all cases it would likely require a coalition of Kennedy Democrats from the urban areas and GOP independents from the hinterlands to win the state's vote.
We would leave it to the RFK campaign, of course, to identify the reachable "Kennedy Democrats" in the most promising state delegations, but this much we can ofer with respect to prying loose potential free agents among the red district delegations. In a word, the needed votes for Kennedy are not likely to be found among adherents of the present-day GOP ideological factions, who are mainly united not by philosophy but by the party's Washington-based fundraising machine.
These non-economic "issue" based factions include hardcore right-to-lifers, culture warriors, law and order howlers and neocon warmongers. These are essentially all rightwing statists, devoted to stimulating government action aimed to set the world aright as they see it.
Needless to say, they are also careerists cogs in the Washington GOP's fund-raising machine. They like UniParty rule as it is now practiced, even if it is ultimately leading the nation to hell in a hand-basket. So they are likely go of into a rant about young Ms. Shanahan's lefwing history and connections, anyway.
Fine. At the end of the day, these faction-based Republicans are not likely to desert The Donald because he's a rightwing statist, too. During four years in the Oval Ofce, he has already proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he is really about is aggrandizing his own Brobdingnagian ego by mobilizing presidential power on behalf of whatever scheme, phantasm or bugbear strikes his fancy at any given moment.
To the contrary, the overwhelming problem in America today is too much state, not too little efort by Washington to pursue monsters abroad or to root out ills that lie outside of the proper keen of the Federal government. So let wokedom in the local schools or crime in the big cities be handled by state and local governments as the framers of our federal form of government intended.
By "too much state" we are also referring, of course, to the nation's mushrooming fscal disaster and to the corporate-capture of state agencies, most especially the Federal Reserve and the national security apparatus.
These deformations were at one time anathema to the heartland GOP and they could resonant once again with a Kennedy/Shanahan campaign focused on an intelligent version of America First, which we have called Fortress America, and a sweeping fscal retrenchment hinged upon bringing the Empire home.
The fact is, the nation's fscal condition is no longer within the manageable historic lane where the old school GOP pilloried virtually every drop of red ink and the Dems said not to worry because defcits stimulated growth and were far below peak levels reached during WWII. The public debt thus ebbed and fowed in response to partisan policy maneuvers and the business cycle.
No more. The fscal equation has gone completely bust and has been festering for decades, with public debt surging during economic downturns while being barely rectifed, if at all, during periods of macro-economic recovery and expansion.
Consequently, when the budgetary fimfam and Rosy Scenario economics are removed from the latest 10-year CBO budget projections, long-term spending levels are now pinned at 25% of GDP and rising, while Federal receipts are dug in at barely 17% of GDP on a permanent basis.
That computes to an 8% of GDP annual budget defcit versus what even the optimists at CBO say is a 4% rate of nominal GDP growth. That's all that can be expected in an economy freighted down with $97 trillion of public and private debt, a bulging retired population heading toward 100 million pensioners and a native-born labor force that is actually shrinking owing to babies which weren't born during recent decades.
The old saying, therefore, could not be more apt. To wit, when the growth of your outgo is 2X the growth of your income, the upkeep on your debt service payments will quickly become your downfall.
In fact, there is no doubt about it. A few years back Federal interest expense was $300 billion per year, but has already vaulted to nearly $1 trillion. But that's on public debt which is $34 trillion and a weighted-average rate of interest that is still under 3.0%.
The fact is, even if a small amount of undue optimism is excised from the latest CBO projections, the public debt will exceed $60 trillion by the mid-2030s and the weighted average cost of Treasury bills, notes and bonds, which is already pushing toward 5.0%, is likely to be heading even higher. The Fed has simply printed itself into a hopeless infationary corner and will be in no position to massively monetize the debt in the future, as it has done relentlessly since 1987.
In any event, the resulting math computes to $3 trillion of annual interest expense a few years down the road, thereby constituting a fscal millstone that could bury the nation's fnances in a doomsday loop of self-feeding disaster. In fact, the impending struggle to contain exploding debt service expense will make historic partisan battles on fscal matters look like petty squabbles by comparison.
And that's why RFK-the only honest, informed and sentient candidate among the three-can hammer the fscal issue with absolute intellectual rigor and integrity in his quest for the vote of 26 state delegations in the U.S. House.
That's the issue that can powerfully connect with GOP economic conservatives. Above all other threats, there is now an interest expense time-bomb literally ticking toward ignition but RFK is the only one of the three which can credibly address it.
And this gets us to the larger War & Peace issue, where Robert Kennedy and Nicole Shanahan are united on a playbook wholly diferent from that of Biden and Trump. Only they can use this issue to break the fscal logjam that now exists owing to the collapse of counter-vailing partisan positions that had kept the fscal equation reasonably contained in the past.
That it to say, once upon a time the GOP was the party of lower Welfare State spending, the Dems were the champion of higher taxes mainly from the afuent, and both parties saw the Warfare State as an unavoidable necessity of the Cold War that needed to be minimized to the extent practical.
But when in the 1980s Ronald Reagan cut taxes deeply, the neocons fostered a drastic rise in the defense budget and Alan Greenspan installed the doctrine of "wealth efects" Keynesianism at the Fed, everything changed. The partisan policy diferences that tended to contain the Federal defcit just plain vanished.
Instead, all three broad components of the fscal equation became insurmountable partisan barricades. Yet no fscal crisis immediately ensued because the Fed made chronic defcit fnance temporarily easy by monetizing the US Treasury's enormous emission of debt paper.
At the same time, the GOP turned tax increases into political poison while continuously chipping away at current revenue levels as a policy principle of frst resort. The Dems, in turn, transformed Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements into the third-rail of American politics. And the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991 notwithstanding, the hawks and interventionists of both wings of the UniParty became the ferocious champions of a needlessly ballooning Warfare State.
The trigger for the latter was the massive Reagan defense build-up afer 1981, which funded a huge increase in conventional military capacity. It was upon the latter that the Forever Wars of invasion and occupation were made possible in the 1990s and beyond.
As it happened, however, almost everything that was funded as the defense budget rose from $140 billion to $350 billion during the early 1980s had never really been needed to contain the rickety Soviet Empire, which collapsed under its own socialist weight by the end of the decade. These superfuous conventional warfare capabilities included the 600-ship Navy, thousands of new fxed wing and rotary aircraf, new generations of main battle tanks, armored personal carriers and other land warfare equipment, a vast expansion of air and sealif assets and a multitude of new conventional missiles and electronic warfare measures.
Needless to say, these capabilities were just what the generals needed to launch the frst Gulf War and all the subsequent pointless Forever Wars which have ensued. And these interventions could be done with a ready-made force in being that required no massive current increase in defense spending, and therefore no Congressional debate about the purpose or wisdom of the serial interventions.
In the process the national security budget has grown to monstrous proportions. During the current fscal year it will total $1.3 trillion, including $910 billion for defense functions, $74 billion for foreign security assistance and international operations and $320 billion for the deferred cost of the Forever Wars as refected in mushrooming outlays for Veterans health care, disability and other benefts.
The fact is, economic conservatives should have no illusions whatsoever about Donald Trump's ability to break the fscal logjam. That's because he is dug in on the pro-red ink side of each of the three fscal barriers that have brought on the current disaster.
He will never be persuaded to slash the defense budget by hundreds of billions, which is the essential key to reining in America's doomsday spending and borrowing machine. Trump is not only unduly enamored with military "strength" and pomp but notwithstanding his rhetoric about America First, his foreign policy amounts to randomly speaking loudly while waving a big military stick.
At the same time, he has also loudly insisted upon no cuts in Social Security or Medicare and a permanent extension of the $500 billion per year cost of the so-called Trump tax cuts of 2017. In a word, he would not challenge the Dems on the Welfare State, the GOP on the holy grail of low taxes and the the Deep State and its UniParty sponsors on the hideously bloated Warfare State.
Nor is this idle speculation. Donald Trump's four years in the Oval Ofce established that he is reckless beyond measure on fscal matters. During that period he added $8 trillion to the public debt, incurring defcits averaging 9.0% of GDP at a time when national income rose by only 3.6% per annum. That's downright suicidal.
And given the now soaring cost of debt service-even as the money-printers at the Fed are being forced to normalize interest rates to combat infation-there is simply no conceivable way forward fscally under a renewed period of Trumpian fscal chaos in the Oval Ofce.
Alas, when it comes to what should really matter to economic conservatives-a restoration of fscal sobriety-Donald J. Trump is not even remotely ft for purpose.
Exactly 200 years ago was the last time that an insufcient majority in the Electoral College forced the presidential vote into the U.S. House of Representatives. The resulting winner of the 1824 election, John Quincy Adams, was notable not only for being the son of the second president and a Founding Father, but also because he had famously promulgated a few years earlier a doctrine which became the foundation of America's long and prosperous run as a peaceful Republic during the next 93 years.
But it was not only the phrase "she goes NOT abroad, in search of monsters to destroy" that rings out across the subsequent two centuries. The entire framework in which Adams correctly depicted America's proper role in the world is profoundly pertinent in 2024.
That's because the latter was destroyed by Woodrow Wilson's foolish entry into WWI and the subsequent metastasis of John Quincy Adam's peaceful Republic into a destructive global Empire that threatens to now bankrupt the nation and eviscerate American democracy.
That is to say, the time has long-passed to terminate the interminable Washington search for monsters to destroy abroad and to bring the Empire home. Yet the Uniparty in Washington is so beholden to the vast machinery of war and intervention that neither Trump nor Biden ofers even the remotest prospect of embracing that urgent imperative.
By contrast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deeply understands that the very future of capitalist prosperity and democratic governance in America depends frst and foremost on draining the Swamp on the Pentagon side of the Potomac.
So we come full circle. As a practical matter, the only route to that end is a hung jury in the Electoral College, thereby paving the way for an epochal deal in the U.S House of Representatives. That is, a grand bargain that would enable a Kennedy presidency to dismantle the Empire and return America's cratering fscal afairs to some semblance of sustainable order.
In that context, RFK's 2024 anthem and policy remit might well resonate with the words spoken on Independence Day 1821 by John Quincy Adams
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though ofen fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though ofen to heedless and ofen to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when confict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama (feld of blood) the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
Needless to say, a radical change in conventional electoral math would be needed to achieve an RFK led administration that would enable America to fnally return to "her practice" of nonintervention.
Yet as we have detailed above, the route to a history-changing "peace, liberty and prosperity" election of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the US House of Representatives might not be as forbidding as it seems. And certainly his bold choice of Nicole Shanahan as his running mate makes it all the more possible.
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.