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Season 5 - Episode 5
Prosperity and polarization in America

Stephen Moore is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Project for Economic Growth, at The Heritage Foundation. He is a former member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, and helped found the Club for Growth in 1999, serving as its first president until 2004. He has written numerous books, including Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Get Our Economy Back on Track (2018), with Arthur Laffer.

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Having lived through the stagflation of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years, the periods of prosperity under both Reagan and Clinton were a shot in the arm for the United States, argues Stephen Moore in this incisive interview. Unfortunately, under Bush and Obama, the economy faltered again, with very little wage growth for Americans.

“I think the biggest problem facing the country over the last decade or so has been anemic growth, where people just didn’t feel like their lives were getting better.” Donald Trump rode this dissatisfaction to victory in the last presidential election, and thanks to certain of his policies, the US is in pretty good shape economically, says Stephen Moore.

He does admit, though, that $20 trillion of public debt is a concern, as are the President’s protectionist policies, which he himself has challenged. A different worry is the appeal of socialism for a majority of college graduates, yet there’s something in the DNA of Americans, Moore says, that leads them to tend to want to be left alone. “Twenty-seven and a half million Americans own their own business,” he points out. “So we are a nation of entrepreneurs. They are the spinal cord of the American economy.”

What really bothers Stephen Moore is the increased polarization in the country, in which neither side is really able to converse with the other, a situation he characterizes as a “dangerous tinderbox.” And with conservatives and liberals increasingly sorting themselves geographically, it’s a problem that risks getting worse if left unaddressed.

Links of interest

Stephen Moore | The Heritage Foundation | Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Get Our Economy Back on Track

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