On Trade Policy, Trump and Biden Converge

National Catholic Register, 25 September 2020

That convergence is part of a global trend in which economic priorities are shifting — and becoming more consonant with the priorities of the Holy See.

In an election season in which contrasts on policy are sharp while disparagement and division run high, economic policy is one area where there is sometimes more convergence than conflict. 

While the dominant economic story of the election season is the effect of the pandemic and the policy response, there are other economic issues. While there is a division between the Republican and Democratic proposals on taxation, for example, there is remarkable common ground on trade.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden went to Michigan on Sept. 9 to unveil a key part of his economic platform: “Buy American” and “Made in America,” proposals to penalize companies that produce offshore and to provide tax incentives to companies that make their products in America.

If that sounds a bit like “Make America Great Again,” President Donald Trump’s signature slogan, it’s because — on trade policy at least — the two campaigns are not far from each other. That convergence is part of a global trend in which economic priorities are shifting — and becoming more consonant with the priorities of the Holy See.

In the 1990s, the dominant economic consensus was in favor of smaller government, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility and open trade. Those policies were associated with Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, but they had a wider reach. 

That was most evident under President Bill Clinton — he declared “the era of big government is over” in 1995 — who became a champion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite opposition from the traditional labor left. Clinton’s adoption of the smaller-government-open-trade position was indicative of how broad the new consensus was. Sen. Joe Biden voted in favor of NAFTA.

On the Church side, St. John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, while not abandoning solidarity with workers and the preferential option for the poor, offered a defense of economic liberty and called for including the poor nations in the circle of productivity and exchange. It warned against the moral dangers of big government — the “social-assistance state” — and criticized rich countries from excluding poorer countries from open trade. 

That was then; this is now. 

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