Earlier this week, as Vice President Kamala Harris took to the campaign trail to roll out a new set of economic policy proposals, her Republican vice presidential opponent, Sen. JD Vance, took to the internet to criticize them.
“As Kamala Harris talks a big game about standing up for workers, remember that her administration wanted to fire hundreds of thousands of people for refusing the COVID shot,” Vance posted on social media. “It’s all fake.”
Vance’s take-down may sound fairly routine, but one word stands out: “Fake.” Like his running mate Donald Trump and Trump’s many surrogates, Vance has embraced that four-letter word as a catch-all political epithet, used to describe everything from the news media to unfavorable polls to Kamala Harris’ entire personality.
But Vance’s use of the term to describe Harris’ economic proposals gets at something deeper than Trump’s verbal tic. To those in the know on the right, Vance’s repeated use of the word “fake” points toward a broader critique of America’s economic order. It’s one that has gained purchase among the small clique of conservative writers and activists surrounding Vance — a group often known as the “New Right.” And if Trump wins in November, the critique that underlies Vance’s use of the word could play a critical role in shaping the economic policy of a potential Trump-Vance administration.
So, what does Vance really mean by “fake”? In the eyes of many on the New Right, the United States has not one but two economies — a “real economy” grounded in productive industries like manufacturing and transportation, and a “fake economy,” based on non-productive industries like finance and consulting, where productivity is measured in terms of intangible economic growth rather than the production of tangible goods and services.
As Vance put it during a speech in Byron Center, Michigan in mid-August, “I like to talk about the ‘real’ versus the ‘fake’ economy. The ‘real’ economy is for the people who build things with their hands, who get it to our stores, who transport it from one place to another.” The “fake” economy, by contrast, is all the economic activity that shows up in GDP measurements but that doesn’t “put people to work making real products for American families” as Vance put it in his speech at the Republican National Convention.
As Vance and his New Right allies see it, the “fake economy” has gradually swallowed up the “real economy” as the spread of globalization and the financialization of economic markets have shifted the focus of U.S. economic policy from producing goods and services to growing financial assets and ensuring returns on investments. This shift, in turn, has had profound consequences for the United States: In addition to blowing up the trade deficit and making the U.S. reliant on foreign imports for basic goods, the rise of the “fake economy” has concentrated economic power in the hands of asset-owning elites and harmed working-class communities — like the southwestern Ohio steel town that Vance grew up in — that depend on the “real economy” for their economic livelihood. As Vance said while running for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, “You’re going to have a fiscal problem in this country so long as we have a fake economy where we rely on countries that hate us to make our stuff.”
To be sure, Vance’s casual reliance on calling things “fake” as a shorthand for this broader critique can result in some bizarre soundbites — like the time last year when Vance declared that “economics is fake” because his 40-year-old refrigerator kept lettuce fresher than a newer fridge that he had just purchased.
But some iterations of Vance’s argument have even gained acceptance across the political spectrum. During last year’s legislative fight over U.S. aid for Ukraine, for instance, Vance repeatedly argued that the relative strength of the American economy — measured purely in terms of GDP — did not reflect its actual military strength in a match-up with Russia. That point garnered significant agreement at this year’s Munich Security Conference, where even supporters of U.S. aid to Ukraine acknowledged that U.S. economic power doesn’t mean it has the industrial capacity to support an extended war with Russia.
In other settings, Vance has embraced the critique — shared by many mainstream economists — that economic indicators like GDP are not meaningful measures of a society’s economic health. “One of the [animating] forces in my politics is I have a deep skepticism of how we measure things and whether it’s actually captured reality,” Vance told POLITICO Magazine earlier this year.
On the campaign trail, though, Vance has been vague about how he and Trump plan to restrain the growth of the “fake” economy and resuscitate the “real” one. So far, he has largely paid lip service to Trump’s economic agenda, which pairs sweeping immigration restrictions, aggressive tariffs and deregulation of American energy markets with broad-based tax-breaks that would benefit big businesses and high-earners. The closest that Vance has come to laying out a blueprint for the stimulating the “real economy” came during a talk he gave at the right-leaning economic think tank American Compass in 2023, where he talked in broad strokes about shifting economic policy to “make working on real things pay more money than it does right now … [and] make working on fake things pay less.”
But until he lays out a more substantial plan for growing the “real” economy, Vance will have to contend with a familiar criticism: that his economic populism is as fake as the economy he decries.
The real reason JD Vance calls everything ‘fake’
politico.com
September 12, 2024 3:23 am
Earlier this week, as Vice President Kamala Harris took to the campaign trail to roll out a new set of economic policy proposals, her Republican vice presidential opponent, Sen. JD Vance, took to the internet to criticize them.
“As Kamala Harris talks a big game about standing up for workers, remember that her administration wanted to fire hundreds of thousands of people for refusing the COVID shot,” Vance posted on social media. “It’s all fake.”
Vance’s take-down may sound fairly routine, but one word stands out: “Fake.” Like his running mate Donald Trump and Trump’s many surrogates, Vance has embraced that four-letter word as a catch-all political epithet, used to describe everything from the news media to unfavorable polls to Kamala Harris’ entire personality.
But Vance’s use of the term to describe Harris’ economic proposals gets at something deeper than Trump’s verbal tic. To those in the know on the right, Vance’s repeated use of the word “fake” points toward a broader critique of America’s economic order. It’s one that has gained purchase among the small clique of conservative writers and activists surrounding Vance — a group often known as the “New Right.” And if Trump wins in November, the critique that underlies Vance’s use of the word could play a critical role in shaping the economic policy of a potential Trump-Vance administration.
So, what does Vance really mean by “fake”? In the eyes of many on the New Right, the United States has not one but two economies — a “real economy” grounded in productive industries like manufacturing and transportation, and a “fake economy,” based on non-productive industries like finance and consulting, where productivity is measured in terms of intangible economic growth rather than the production of tangible goods and services.
As Vance put it during a speech in Byron Center, Michigan in mid-August, “I like to talk about the ‘real’ versus the ‘fake’ economy. The ‘real’ economy is for the people who build things with their hands, who get it to our stores, who transport it from one place to another.” The “fake” economy, by contrast, is all the economic activity that shows up in GDP measurements but that doesn’t “put people to work making real products for American families” as Vance put it in his speech at the Republican National Convention.
As Vance and his New Right allies see it, the “fake economy” has gradually swallowed up the “real economy” as the spread of globalization and the financialization of economic markets have shifted the focus of U.S. economic policy from producing goods and services to growing financial assets and ensuring returns on investments. This shift, in turn, has had profound consequences for the United States: In addition to blowing up the trade deficit and making the U.S. reliant on foreign imports for basic goods, the rise of the “fake economy” has concentrated economic power in the hands of asset-owning elites and harmed working-class communities — like the southwestern Ohio steel town that Vance grew up in — that depend on the “real economy” for their economic livelihood. As Vance said while running for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, “You’re going to have a fiscal problem in this country so long as we have a fake economy where we rely on countries that hate us to make our stuff.”
To be sure, Vance’s casual reliance on calling things “fake” as a shorthand for this broader critique can result in some bizarre soundbites — like the time last year when Vance declared that “economics is fake” because his 40-year-old refrigerator kept lettuce fresher than a newer fridge that he had just purchased.
But some iterations of Vance’s argument have even gained acceptance across the political spectrum. During last year’s legislative fight over U.S. aid for Ukraine, for instance, Vance repeatedly argued that the relative strength of the American economy — measured purely in terms of GDP — did not reflect its actual military strength in a match-up with Russia. That point garnered significant agreement at this year’s Munich Security Conference, where even supporters of U.S. aid to Ukraine acknowledged that U.S. economic power doesn’t mean it has the industrial capacity to support an extended war with Russia.
In other settings, Vance has embraced the critique — shared by many mainstream economists — that economic indicators like GDP are not meaningful measures of a society’s economic health. “One of the [animating] forces in my politics is I have a deep skepticism of how we measure things and whether it’s actually captured reality,” Vance told POLITICO Magazine earlier this year.
On the campaign trail, though, Vance has been vague about how he and Trump plan to restrain the growth of the “fake” economy and resuscitate the “real” one. So far, he has largely paid lip service to Trump’s economic agenda, which pairs sweeping immigration restrictions, aggressive tariffs and deregulation of American energy markets with broad-based tax-breaks that would benefit big businesses and high-earners. The closest that Vance has come to laying out a blueprint for the stimulating the “real economy” came during a talk he gave at the right-leaning economic think tank American Compass in 2023, where he talked in broad strokes about shifting economic policy to “make working on real things pay more money than it does right now … [and] make working on fake things pay less.”
But until he lays out a more substantial plan for growing the “real” economy, Vance will have to contend with a familiar criticism: that his economic populism is as fake as the economy he decries.