Make Austria Great Again!!!!!
The left gets trounced!!!!
And guess what? MORE TAX CUTS!!!!!
You know, because supply side tickle down economics doesn't work! (Huge friggin sarcasm alert!)
Generation Y Takes Over
Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to a 31-year-old leader?
Sebastian Kurz in Vienna after his People’s Party finished first in parliamentary elections, Oct. 15. PHOTO: THOMAS KRONSTEINER/GETTY IMAGES
By
Daniel Henninger
Oct. 18, 2017 6:16 p.m. ET
405 COMMENTS
Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to a 31-year-old? To which the world’s 31-year-olds might reply: Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to somebody in his 70s? You can’t leave Donald Trump out of anything these days, but the volatile septuagenarian’s victory looks like one last baby boomer swimming against the global tides.
Austria on Sunday voted to make its 31-year-old foreign minister Sebastian Kurz the country’s next prime minister. National leadership hasn’t seen anyone this baby-faced since the age of hereditary monarchies.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is 39. Ireland’s new prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is 38. Estonian PM Jüri Ratas is 39, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau is 45 going on 29. Jacinda Ardern, 37, is about to become New Zealand’s next prime minister, its youngest in 150 years.
It’s possible that Generation Y’s rise to power is merely a statistical anomaly, but I doubt it. Many of the world’s democratic electorates are itching for change, and the fastest way to scratch that itch is to drop down a generation for new leadership.
It’s hard to blame voters for playing the youth card. The world’s smartest marketers have decided that everything else is in the hands of millennials, though fortunately no one yet has proposed letting a 19-year-old run a country from an iPhone screen. (The 19-year-olds might ask what running a nation from a Twitter account has to do with defining the age of reason.)
From the U.S. in 2016 to Austria this week, there’s a one-word default explanation for these results: immigration.
Yes, but.
Yes, elites in power mishandled inflows of immigrants and refugees. They underestimated or ignored the challenges of assimilation, made clear in a thoughtful recent article in this newspaper headlined: “German Towns Filled With Refugees Ask, ‘Who Is Integrating Whom?’ ”
But immigration is a subset of a larger global problem. The dominant economic event of our era is the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and ended for the U.S. in 2009. Its status as a “great” economic downturn is attributed to its long aftermath of unemployment and, more important, underemployment.
As the U.S. and European economies failed to achieve pre-recession growth levels, which exacerbated social anxieties, the elites produced an explanation. They called it “the new normal.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offered a bloodless explanation of the new normal in December 2013: “Moving forward, there are reasons to believe that growth will continue to be slower than originally hoped.” Indeed, “Looking forward to 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects slower GDP growth to become the ‘new normal.’ ”
For the U.S., this meant the postwar growth average of about 3% was dead, and a 2% average, at best, would be the norm. Europe’s growth would be marginally lower.
The “new normal” theory, which in a wink became conventional wisdom among conventional economists and pundits, exists mainly to absolve them—and Barack Obama —of responsibility for weaker growth’s dire effects on national standards of living. What the theory failed to capture is that the new normal creates angry have-nots.
Voters everywhere are rebelling against the new normal. They won’t concede its implicit acceptance of flattened opportunities for younger Americans or Europeans still in their prime working years, who don’t have sinecures explaining to everyone else why this is as good as it will ever get. Increasingly, they are voting into office political outliers—from Trump to Macron to Kurz.
Mr. Macron is trying to revive the long-forgotten French word “entrepreneur” and pushing past-due labor reforms. Mr. Kurz, a tax cutter, has proposed relief from Austria’s conventional European social compact of stiflingly high tax rates in return for a somnambulant welfare state.
Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan should be seen as a proxy for what the next Democratic presidential nominee is likely to run on. Influenced by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers’s theories on “secular stagnation,” Mr. Trudeau is making massive outlays on infrastructure repair and modernization to revive demand inside Canada. Mr. Summers attributed the Trudeau victory in 2015 to his promised blitz of infrastructure spending.
Donald Trump is an infrastructure guy, too, but his path out of the new normal’s long-term trap runs mainly through regulatory relief and reforming the U.S. tax system.
In an important speech, recently, Mr. Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett explained the administration’s belief that fixing tax incentives can deliver growth and personal incomes higher than the new normal’s lowered horizons.
In 2016, for instance, U.S. firms kept 71% of their foreign-earned profits abroad, “benefiting other nations’ workers.” What would be the effect, Mr. Hassett asked, if for the next eight years, those profits were repatriated and reinvested here through a tax regime designed to promote more capital investment in the domestic economy? Incomes would rise.
There is good news after all. Whether nations are placing their bets with a 31-year-old or a 71-year-old, voters are refusing to live with the anxieties and dangers of a low-growth status quo.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
Appeared in the October 19, 2017, print edition as 'Generation Y Takes Over.'
The left gets trounced!!!!
And guess what? MORE TAX CUTS!!!!!
You know, because supply side tickle down economics doesn't work! (Huge friggin sarcasm alert!)
Generation Y Takes Over
Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to a 31-year-old leader?
Sebastian Kurz in Vienna after his People’s Party finished first in parliamentary elections, Oct. 15. PHOTO: THOMAS KRONSTEINER/GETTY IMAGES
By
Daniel Henninger
Oct. 18, 2017 6:16 p.m. ET
405 COMMENTS
Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to a 31-year-old? To which the world’s 31-year-olds might reply: Why would anyone turn over the future of their country to somebody in his 70s? You can’t leave Donald Trump out of anything these days, but the volatile septuagenarian’s victory looks like one last baby boomer swimming against the global tides.
Austria on Sunday voted to make its 31-year-old foreign minister Sebastian Kurz the country’s next prime minister. National leadership hasn’t seen anyone this baby-faced since the age of hereditary monarchies.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is 39. Ireland’s new prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is 38. Estonian PM Jüri Ratas is 39, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau is 45 going on 29. Jacinda Ardern, 37, is about to become New Zealand’s next prime minister, its youngest in 150 years.
It’s possible that Generation Y’s rise to power is merely a statistical anomaly, but I doubt it. Many of the world’s democratic electorates are itching for change, and the fastest way to scratch that itch is to drop down a generation for new leadership.
It’s hard to blame voters for playing the youth card. The world’s smartest marketers have decided that everything else is in the hands of millennials, though fortunately no one yet has proposed letting a 19-year-old run a country from an iPhone screen. (The 19-year-olds might ask what running a nation from a Twitter account has to do with defining the age of reason.)
From the U.S. in 2016 to Austria this week, there’s a one-word default explanation for these results: immigration.
Yes, but.
Yes, elites in power mishandled inflows of immigrants and refugees. They underestimated or ignored the challenges of assimilation, made clear in a thoughtful recent article in this newspaper headlined: “German Towns Filled With Refugees Ask, ‘Who Is Integrating Whom?’ ”
But immigration is a subset of a larger global problem. The dominant economic event of our era is the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and ended for the U.S. in 2009. Its status as a “great” economic downturn is attributed to its long aftermath of unemployment and, more important, underemployment.
As the U.S. and European economies failed to achieve pre-recession growth levels, which exacerbated social anxieties, the elites produced an explanation. They called it “the new normal.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offered a bloodless explanation of the new normal in December 2013: “Moving forward, there are reasons to believe that growth will continue to be slower than originally hoped.” Indeed, “Looking forward to 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects slower GDP growth to become the ‘new normal.’ ”
For the U.S., this meant the postwar growth average of about 3% was dead, and a 2% average, at best, would be the norm. Europe’s growth would be marginally lower.
The “new normal” theory, which in a wink became conventional wisdom among conventional economists and pundits, exists mainly to absolve them—and Barack Obama —of responsibility for weaker growth’s dire effects on national standards of living. What the theory failed to capture is that the new normal creates angry have-nots.
Voters everywhere are rebelling against the new normal. They won’t concede its implicit acceptance of flattened opportunities for younger Americans or Europeans still in their prime working years, who don’t have sinecures explaining to everyone else why this is as good as it will ever get. Increasingly, they are voting into office political outliers—from Trump to Macron to Kurz.
Mr. Macron is trying to revive the long-forgotten French word “entrepreneur” and pushing past-due labor reforms. Mr. Kurz, a tax cutter, has proposed relief from Austria’s conventional European social compact of stiflingly high tax rates in return for a somnambulant welfare state.
Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan should be seen as a proxy for what the next Democratic presidential nominee is likely to run on. Influenced by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers’s theories on “secular stagnation,” Mr. Trudeau is making massive outlays on infrastructure repair and modernization to revive demand inside Canada. Mr. Summers attributed the Trudeau victory in 2015 to his promised blitz of infrastructure spending.
Donald Trump is an infrastructure guy, too, but his path out of the new normal’s long-term trap runs mainly through regulatory relief and reforming the U.S. tax system.
In an important speech, recently, Mr. Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett explained the administration’s belief that fixing tax incentives can deliver growth and personal incomes higher than the new normal’s lowered horizons.
In 2016, for instance, U.S. firms kept 71% of their foreign-earned profits abroad, “benefiting other nations’ workers.” What would be the effect, Mr. Hassett asked, if for the next eight years, those profits were repatriated and reinvested here through a tax regime designed to promote more capital investment in the domestic economy? Incomes would rise.
There is good news after all. Whether nations are placing their bets with a 31-year-old or a 71-year-old, voters are refusing to live with the anxieties and dangers of a low-growth status quo.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
Appeared in the October 19, 2017, print edition as 'Generation Y Takes Over.'
