U.S. policy should be to import as many chip-on-the-shoulder achievers as we can find. One of Uber’s founders, also an immigrant, seems to have been carrying a different type of chip on his shoulder, yet it still proved useful to the American economy. Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes: “Many people may not realize that one of the founders of Uber, Garrett Camp, is an immigrant from Canada. Camp came up with the idea for Uber after becoming frustrated dealing with taxis while seeing a girlfriend.”24
Okay, maybe that’s not quite as inspiring a tale as the escape from Tehran, but Mr. Camp and his cofounder Travis Kalanick have made life easier for millions of people looking for rides.
Legitimate asylum seekers and Canadian transplants aren’t the only people who make great contributions to the United States. And of course some immigrants do much more than found ride-hailing companies. According to Anderson: “Mexican-born immigrant and Medal of Honor recipient Alfred Rascon was once asked about his courage on the battlefield fighting for America even though he had yet to become a citizen. ‘I was always an American in my heart,’ said Rascon.
As for the other potential drivers of growth, in an interview with us the president said a June Supreme Court decision gives him a lot of latitude to act administratively without going to Congress.25 In a 5–4 decision Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Court’s four liberals in preventing the president from rescinding the Obama decision to allow the so-called Dreamers, people brought here illegally as children, to remain in the United States. The baffling decision requires the Trump administration to conduct a long and difficult rule-making process to rescind his predecessor’s policy, even though the Obama policy wasn’t legal.
The Court found—or invented—a broad presidential ability to entrench federal policies without changes in law. The Obama policy was known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and Trump seems eager to make the most of the precedent. He told us that “when the Supreme Court ruled on DACA, they gave the President powers the likes of which have never been given to a President. And I always said, ‘They can’t rule positively on DACA. There’s no way they can do it.’… And yet for political reasons, they ruled on DACA the way they did.… So I’m going to be doing tax cuts and I’m signing them myself. I’m not going through Congress.”26
Trump pointed out that under the new precedent he has the right to enact other changes along with tax cuts, “like a health care bill, like an immigration bill, like numerous things. They’re all being drawn right now. And all I have to do is sign them.” He added that he intends to enact a big tax cut for middle-income taxpayers and also wants to knock the corporate income tax rate down another notch to 20 percent from 21 percent.27
Speaking of the courts, Trump forecasts in our interview that there will soon be a total of three hundred Trump appointees seated on the federal bench. And he thanks former Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who in 2013 led his fellow Democrats in abolishing the Senate filibuster for the consideration of potential federal judges. The Reid change meant that a minority of senators could no longer block votes, and, therefore, many more judicial appointments could be confirmed. Reid and his colleagues engineered this break with Senate tradition in order to pack the influential D.C. Circuit with their ideological allies, perhaps not realizing that once in the majority, Republicans could use the same method to approve lots of conservative judges. Before Reid destroyed the judicial filibuster, such an action was known as the “nuclear option,” because it represented such a radical shift in Senate process. Now some Democrats regret their decision to detonate, and Trump says this includes current Senate minority leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) The president reports that Schumer frequently says, “The worst thing that ever happened to us was Harry Reid.” But of course Trump sees the situation differently: “Thank God we had the nuclear option.”28
Still, as he closes in on the end of his first term, there are many things about the political process for which the president is not at all thankful. Maria asked him for the biggest takeaway from his time in Washington. “Deep-seated corruption,” responded Trump. “People are there and they’re protected.”29
If reelected, Trump will need a growing economy to finance the massive federal debt held by the public, which has ballooned to a staggering $21 trillion. In the area of restraining spending, Trump has failed just like the usual professional politicians. Biden’s proposals would increase the debt even faster than Trump’s. But if the president is reelected, America needs him to enact spending restraint before interest rates rise back up toward typical levels and servicing the federal debt becomes unbearable.
The other big related challenge is maintaining the value of the dollar and preventing inflation after the Federal Reserve just created nearly $3 trillion of new money to maintain the financial system while the nation’s underlying economy was largely shut down.
On this score the president deserves great credit for appointing economist Judy Shelton to the board of the Fed. At her confirmation hearing in the Senate Banking Committee, Ms. Shelton showed her keen understanding that the Fed does not exist to enable ever larger federal budgets. Shelton said:
I keep going back to the fact that the power to regulate the value of U.S. money was granted by our Constitution to Congress. It’s in Article 1, Section 8. And in the very same sentence Congress is given the power to define the official weights and measures for our country,
