For many years, we have wandered in the darkness. Politics has been dominated by culture wars and the personality of Donald Trump: economic policy has become increasingly absent. And where there is no economics at all, how can we find bad economics? Are the golden days of Ron Paul and his ilk never to be seen again?

Fear not my friends, for we have been given unto us a messiah. His name is RFK Jr and he's running for president.

Probably, you're already familiar with him because of his various conspiracy views. For those not aware, he runs a crank medical organization that's worried about vaccines and fluoride and all that jazz. His organization seems to think that the covid vaccine contains tracking chips with cryptocurrency features that will enable the Fed to do something or other with digital dollars. He's worried about 5g and iPhone radiation and how it all interacts with vaccines. Where you read "covid" he reads "(((covid)))".

You get the picture. But we're not here for that. We're here for economic policy. What's he got in the tank for that?

Well, he's running for president. Might as well start with his economic platform. Because baby, he's got a 14 point plan! I wonder if he chose 14 on purpose. I digress.

The shining highlight of this list is this thing of beauty right here:

Drop housing costs by $1000 per family and make home ownership affordable by backing 3% home mortgages with tax-free bonds.

He likes to talk about this one on twitter as well. Ain't it a doozy? The RI for this is actually already available, sitting on the shelf.

In fairness, he apparently does want to legalize ADUs. So I guess things could be worse. But I'd argue that the upshot of legalizing ADUs is offset by this ominous business on that page about trying to engineer the tax code to prevent corporations from buying single family homes.

What else do we have in this platform? Oddly, it's not all bad (not that we are here to look at the bright spots). I'd say the home mortgage thing is probably at the frontier of (bad economics, novel and interesting). There are worse policies in there, of course, but mostly we've seen it all before. Bog standard protectionism, basically. For example, Cut energy prices by restricting natural gas exports. Or: Negotiate trade deals that prevent low-wage countries from competing with American workers in a “race to the bottom.” And: Secure the border and bring illegal immigration to a halt.

You get the picture. He also blends some of his crankery into the platform. He has something about establishing "addiction healing centers on organic farms" and about expanding access to "low-cost alternative and holistic therapies" in the healthcare system.

In terms of other content in his platform, I'll cover a few minor highlights. Everything that follows is from the economy page of his website, unless an additional link is given:

Support small businesses by redirecting regulatory scrutiny onto large corporations. [...] We will enact policies that favor small and medium businesses, which are the nation’s real job creators and the dynamos of American enterprise.

This 'small is beautiful' mindset really seems to infect a lot of people. But it's not clear we really should want to favor them.

For one, it doesn't really seem to be true that small and medium businesses are the nation's "real job creators". It's based on a long standing misconception: it's not really business size that seems to matter for job creation, but rather business age. Basically, new companies tend to grow like gangbusters or go bankrupt. Young startups with lots of job creation in their future do start small - hence you might mistakenly thing it's size, not age, that matters. But once a small business gets to be a little long in the tooth, to a first approximation, it doesn't have much job creation in its future.

For two, mom and pop shops kind of suck to work at. Big companies are large and efficient. They often are more productive and better managed than mom and pop shops. They pay better. Mom and pop shops are also notorious for being worse when it comes to minimum wage compliance to workplace safety rules to workplace harassment. Big companies know they're a target large enough to be worth suing or pursuing enforcement actions against, and have institutions within them dedicated to handling those issues. Small businesses generally aren't big enough to be worth targeting and generally don't have such institutions. Moreover, if you run your own micro business, you have some folks that just like running them as petty tyrants. So it really isn't clear to me that we should particularly promotes small businesses over large businesses. And promoting them by loosening regulatory scrutiny of them even further is a bit perverse.

As for the final "dynamos of American enterprise" remark. You could interpret this many ways. I would just note that it seems unlikely that small firms would be all that good at innovation and R&D outside of certain special cases. My hunch seems to be correct on average.

I'd add that overall, he is big on this mom and pop vs large company thing. He's got some blast from the past type "let's be worried about walmart driving out local grocery store" type content on twitter, for example. This is an ancient debate at this point, but 10 years ago there were some papers about this and the bottom line seems to be consistent with big box entry being good for consumer welfare.

Expand free childcare to millions of families.

Not much to say here beyond: good luck finding the labor without immigration or gains from trade with low wage countries.

Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and cut interest rates on student loans to zero.

This is a fun one, because assessing it is impossible without understanding the intent of the policy. I have heard schemes to make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, but to transfer the debt back to the university or college if that happens. I actually think that's not a terrible idea, provided it's implemented intelligently, and would push us toward an equilibrium where schools are less keen to enroll people in negative return degrees. On the other hand, if they skip the university liability part, this would just turn out to be free college through the backdoor, so, not so genius.

Cut drug costs by half to bring them in line with other nations.

When other people propose this kind of thing, I generally imagine that they just aren't thinking about possible impacts on pharmaceutical research and development. But in RFK's case, I suppose that may be the point. If I thought pharmaceutical R&D was mainly focused on manufacturing mind control devices and new autism delivery mechanisms, I guess I would want to tamp down on it as well...

People always ask, “How are we going to pay for all this?” The answer is simple. First is to end the military adventures and regime-change wars, like the one in Ukraine. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya already cost us over $8 trillion. That’s $90,000 per family of four. That’s enough to pay off all medical debt, all credit card debt, provide free childcare, feed every hungry child, repair our infrastructure, and make college tuition free – with money left over. That’s enough to make social security solvent for another 30 years.

This is another great one. He'll fund his various schemes by spending the sunk costs from W Bush's wars? Genius stuff. I suppose we could cut off Ukraine; if we did that upfront, we'd have saved all of 75 billion dollars, much of the value of which was in the form of in kind transfers in aging equipment. I'm sure that'll go real far. (If we were r/badgeopolitics, I'd have more yet to say about. But alas.)

[Continuing the pay-for discussion.] Second is to end the corruption in Washington, the corporate giveaways, the boondoggles, the bailouts of the too-big-to-fail that leave the little guy at the mercy of the market. Corporations right now are sitting on $8 trillion in cash. Their contribution to tax revenues was 33% in the 1950s – it is 10% today. It’s high time they paid their fair share.

The too big to fail bailouts! Normie hatred of our efforts to save us from a second great depression in 2008 will never burn out, will it? I guess you can read this as wanting to triple the corporate tax rate as well. Nothing like some good ol fashioned double marginalization to close your budget holes.

At any rate, I think it's clear that Mr. Kennedy has potential. This little platform of his is a nice starting point. And there is plenty of reason to hope for me. Like I said, he's running and it doesn't look like he's likely to slink away anytime soon. And he isn't shy about broaching various policies issues on his twitter, in his own way. You only get breadcrumbs, really, but you get occasional gems, like his plan to ban fracking to discourage plastics production. And you get some classic treats: for example, he reads zerohedge on inflation.

It could all go belly up, of course. But I think RFK Jr is a great cause for hope. We could have a real bounty of novel bad economics in our future.