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[NYCmetsfan]

At a private gathering of wealthy Republicans this June, a banker named Edward Conard made a radical proposal: To save capitalism from Donald Trump, American business leaders would need to abandon old allies and make an “odious” new deal with low-wage workers.

“If advocates of the free enterprise want to regain control of the Republican Party … we need to find middle ground with these workers,” Conard. “The question is: How do we build a coalition with displaced workers like we did with the religious right after Roe vs. Wade, and which we used to lower the marginal tax rate from 70% to 28%?”

Conard, clad in a blazer and slacks and the ease that can be a marker of class, spoke from scrawled notes. His solution was — to the audience — hair-raisingly radical in its simplicity. It was a kind of roadmap for one future of the Republican Party, assuming the party (or at least the Wall Street wing of it) survives Trump. His plan requires replacing the religious right in the Republican coalition with the new populists, and mollifying them with new restrictions on trade and immigration — all in exchange for the holy grail of lower marginal tax rates.

Crucial to any new deal is that it “leaves us … us being advocates of free enterprise, in control of the coalition.” That is to say: That part of the deal is lower marginal tax rates. “Because it doesn’t do us any good to be in the coalition if they are going to destroy free enterprise in the process and turn the Republican Party into what I think the Democratic Party already is,” he said.

And to replace religious conservatives in the Republican coalition with low-wage workers, he warned, would require a new set of “tough, and perhaps even odious compromises.”

First, he said, the government would have to intervene in trade policy to force other countries to spend more of their savings on U.S. exports — a system he calls “balanced trade.” In his new book, he lays out a system of import licenses to enforce this — a system, he admitted when he came by BuzzFeed in New York last week, many of his friends on the right will hate.

The second plan is, by the open market standards of the Wall Street Journal and the American business class, even more radical.

“Unfortunately, I think we have to dial down low-skilled immigration,” he said. “No employer is going to go through the effort to employ hard-to-employ workers unless there’s a shortage of labor, and there’s not going to be a shortage of labor in a world where there is a near infinite supply of labor unless we create it. And, if we do create it, it’s going to put pressure on employers to hire those workers and find jobs for them because they’ll be the only workers left to hire.”

Conard offered one bright lining to compensate: a dramatic increase — in immigration at the very high end. Say, 5 million new engineers and scientists and other groups of workers who are hard to find and expensive to pay.

Beyond parody at this point. Though its always good to have them so open about the only thing they care about.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/saving-gop-for-capitalism?utm_term=.mo6m4aq6x#.csPkbayAW

This guys last book?

 

[Derwind]

Rich get richer.

 

[Quixzlizx]

The worst of both worlds.

 

[TyrantII]

Doctor Frankenstein on full display.

 

[NeOak]

Waiting for the Simpsons image about this.