Vance Lays Out a Blue-Collar Vision That Clashes With Trump’s Record

J.D. Vance, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee, has embraced a vision to lift the American working class with policies that would break radically with Republican economic orthodoxy, and at times with former President Donald J. Trump’s own plans.

Now he faces questions from left-leaning and right-leaning economists on whether it would actually work.

The broad vision, laid out in the Ohio senator’s acceptance speech on Wednesday night and through interviews and detailed somewhat in the truncated Republican platform, seeks to raise wages and restore American manufacturing in two basic ways: impose across-the-board tariffs on all imports to favor American-made products, and reduce downward pressure on wages by deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and narrowing the path into the country for legal immigrants.

Meantime, the Republican platform, adopted just ahead of the convention, pledges to end inflation, increase energy production, stop sending manufacturing jobs overseas, cut taxes for workers and corporations, keep the dollar the world’s reserve currency and protect the largest domestic programs, Social Security and Medicare, from any cuts.

“We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street — we’ll commit to the working man,” Mr. Vance said in his speech. “We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.”

To some economists on the left and the right, the policies might have political appeal to blue-collar workers, but they are economically incoherent and inherently inflationary, and will ultimately harm the people they purport to help.