Ramaswamy Grabs Headlines, but Must Offer Serious Agendas

Vivek Ramaswamy's budget-cutting pretensions are a beat behind the room. Evidence?

President Trump, master of the popular mood, used to regularly call to "drain the swamp." Now?

Not so much.

Per The Atlantic:

"As the 2016 presidential election drew to an end, Donald Trump began using a new slogan: ‘Drain the swamp.’ It was a neat encapsulation of his critique of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and of the country’s governing establishment of both parties, which he painted as corrupt, cozy, and self-dealing.
"These days, the catchphrase has begun to vanish from his repertoire. Last month, The Washington Post calculated that Trump had used it "just 59 times on Truth Social, his social media site, in the past two years — fewer times than he wrote about it on Twitter in October 2016 alone." … Trump himself will never say it, but the credo of his second term is coming into focus: Fill the swamp."

Thank goodness for Trump's shrewdness! Swamps, by their very nature, cannot be drained.

George Washington learned the hard way. Per MountVernon.org:

"A land-speculation venture, the Dismal Swamp Company was founded in 1763 to drain, tame, and make profitable the Great Dismal Swamp, a wetland that stretches across hundreds of thousands of acres between Norfolk, Virginia and Edenton, North Carolina. …
"In 1763, however, twelve leading Virginians — including George Washington — formed the Dismal Swamp Company with the goal of ‘training Improving and Saving the Land.’ Washington was appointed one of the three managers responsible for securing title, surveying, assembling a labor force of sixty enslaved workers and making the operation self-sustaining and profitable. He visited the swamp at least six times during the next decade. During the 1760s and '70s, enslaved people dug ditches and produced shingles from the swamp’s cedar trees, but the Company failed either to drain the swamp or to grow hemp for export."

Note to Team Trump! Swamps can, and should, be transformed from fetid to sweet, by proper water quality measures. Not drained. Thank Gov. DeSantis for his more than billion dollar generosity toward restoring the Everglades just so.

As for swamp dwellers, I'm the son of a career civil servant, Max Benko, who rose in the ranks of the New York State Department of Law from title examiner to assistant attorney general. I myself worked, under Reagan, as a Schedule C career civil servant for the U.S. Department of Energy’s general counsel’s office, then detailed to a presidential commission and the White House staff.

I know that culture wherein I encountered career civil servant humor. Hilarious and essential: Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn.

We career civil servants would greet the new political appointees by telling them, flatteringly-sounding, they were the "A Team," we were the "B Team." Ha!

Out of earshot of our new "bosses" we would slap five and say, We "Be" here when they arrive, and we "Be" here when they leave (... in about two years. The median tenure for political appointees).

Career civil servants are good at outwaiting, when not outwitting, budget-cutting political appointees!

I was one of about three hardcore deficit-hawk supply-siders back in the Reagan Revolution days. (Plus Reagan himself, of course).

The only known way to achieve the conservative goal of smaller (relative to society) government is to cap its growth at, say, 2% per year (real), while unleashing high private sector growth, say, 4% per year (real).

Not by cutting spending. The political math precludes ...

Yet real prosperity quickly turns federal deficits to surpluses, à la Bill Clinton’s embellishing the Reagan supply-side formula. We knew how to generate equitable prosperity then.

We know how to do so now. We haven't been.

Now, let's.

The president-elect has promised the golden age for America. Time for his economic team to start laying out how.

We know how.

However, Vivek Ramaswamy is not laying out a serious growth agenda. He is having a blast making headline-grabbing preposterous pronouncements.

Performative, not practical. Shtick not shock.

The flamboyances are attention-getting ... for Ramaswamy. Few of his recommendations will be implemented, none will prove consequential.

C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la politique; c’est de la folie! ("It’s magnificent but it isn’t politics; it’s madness.")

DOGE sure looks like a reincarnated Grace Commission. Per the Peterson Foundation "The final report was presented to the president and Congress in January 1984 with over 2,500 recommendations. Most of the recommendations, especially those that required legislation, were never implemented."

If Vivek Ramaswamy wishes to play jester at the Court of the Orange King, he has shown he knows how to juggle preposterous claims. Good political theater!

Donald Trump ascended from tabloid notoriety and "Reality" TV stardom to president. Who knows how high Vivek Ramaswamy can ascend from his new gig at DOGE:

Dismal Swamp Drainage as Standup Comedy: Meet Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.