As he looks to revive his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Monday introduced a 10-point economic plan built on both populist talking points and long-standing conservative doctrine.
In a campaign speech in New Hampshire, DeSantis tore into corporate interests, government bureaucrats and what he called the “failed elites” who have led America into military, cultural and economic decline. “Economic policy needs to be focused on making the cost of living more affordable and the American Dream more attainable for American working families,” DeSantis said. “We cannot allow, no longer, the failed ruling class in this nation to dictate our nation’s policies. We have to defeat those individuals and institutions that have caused our economic malaise.”
His recipe for the economy centered on attacking large corporations and Wall Street while making vague promises to “reward hard work and ingenuity” and “usher in a new era of growth, prosperity and civic pride.” DeSantis proposed to cut taxes, government spending and regulations while also boosting fossil fuel energy and revoking China’s “most favored nation” trade status. He also pledged to change the education system and “make universities, not taxpayers, responsible for the loans their students accrue” and to allow student debt to more easily be discharged through bankruptcy.
“Revitalizing economic freedom and opportunity will require building an economy where the concerns of average citizens are elevated over those deemed too big to fail,” he said. Among his goals, he said: “We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income.”
The politics at play: “His populist, anti-corporatist comments seemed intended to lift his standing with non-college-educated voters, a crucial Republican constituency that polling shows is not supporting Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy in large numbers,” writes Nicholas Nehamas at The New York Times.
The bottom line: This plan and this speech probably won’t do much to boost DeSantis’s campaign. As Nehamas writes: “In sum, the plan largely repeats standard conservative promises to stoke economic growth by reducing taxes on corporations and investors, and by cutting government regulation — proposals that are typically cheered by business lobbyists, despite Mr. DeSantis’s anti-corporate, ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric.”
