The whack-job narcissist Ben “Pyramids are Granaries” Carson didn’t force the Republican presidential field into insanity on federal tax, energy, and infrastructure policy—but now that the national press corps has decided to treat Carson’s hallucinations as one-day stories, thus amplifying his political cachet, it’s time for the rest of us to face reality. In the Rust Belt, that means this: We’d better wake up to the fact that a Democrat is no lock to be our 45^th president. That means that the current economic good news in this region may be as short-lived as US Army Lieutenant Ben Neverwuzzer’s West Point career.

Here’s why. After Obama and his short-lived Congressional majority enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Rust Belt region has been living better on its combination of legacy incomes (pensions and Social Security), some upticks in some sectors, and cheap oil, even if the “stimulus” spending was too little to address the yawning gaps between need and possibility. Real estate development is overheating and manufacturing is dipping in eight of the 10 Rust Belt metros we watch, but large numbers of new jobs in hospitality, in retail trade, and in the lower-paid parts of the healthcare industry are bringing folks back into the workforce, while the financial and professional-services sectors grow.

Various Republican spin-doctors suggest that a Democratic victory means more economic empowerment of the Obama constituencies, but they’re not talking about demographic groups or voter blocs. Obama’s friends, in this narrative, are Silicon Valley engineers, Hollywood, Wall Street, and alt-energy speculators, all of whom, it’s alleged, are not concerned at all about the aggrieved white working-class men who are dying at a faster rate than anyone else. Electing a Democrat, according to critics as various as Joel Kotkin and the staff of the Weekly Standard, will literally kill folks.

Let’s tone it down a bit. (But let’s keep the Carson stories nearby, because they’re so entertaining.)

Here’s the sober issue: Washington makes policies that affect real people. So a change from the current arrangement would have some effects that we can plot out. We should pick through what will happen if a Republican is elected president.

Pro-capital or more pro-capital

Policy changes that would injure this region would be those that would:

a.    dampen consumer demand by restraining wage growth,

b.    push the newly insured healthcare consumer back into their old status as uninsured,

c.    accelerate the globalization of what’s left of manufacturing,

d.    pump even more capital into real estate, and

e.    keep the infrastructure-investment spigot turned off.

Those would be the effects were Republicans to win their campaign against a higher minimum wage and to repeal Obamacare, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, and then to enact the litany of capital-friendly tax incentives that Bush, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, and Trump all hold forth as “serious” plans, which only sound like grown-up policy choices because they lack the gleam-in-the-eye Bronze Age ring of Carson’s call for tithing.

Though Republican policy prescriptions are inimical to the economic interests of their moderate-income suburban white base, and despite the appeal of the economic populism of Bernard Sanders, Republicans may win again in Paladino Country, in Ohio, and in Michigan, because they’re so adept at tweaking cultural anxieties.

But the business class in the Rust Belt should wake up to the threat that a Republican victory poses—because what the region (and the country) needs is for President 45 to do more of what President 44 has been doing, with just one difference: We really do need a transformational energy policy.

Political calculus

It’s actually entertaining, in a scary sort of way. Economic policy might be made by the nutcake anti-scientist Carson, the guy who eschews the peer-reviewed literature on Egyptian antiquities, on astrophysics, on environmental issues, on Holocaust history, and on tax policy, too. He knows what he knows, and because his personal narrative is so lucrative, he remains the world’s greatest authority on whether he stabbed that kid, got offered the West Point slot, won the praise of his Yale professors, or hawked supplements as cancer-cures. Only he knows, folks!

What the rest of us know, though, is that Washington affects local economies. Take energy policy, for example. When Washington Republicans strip away the tax incentives for alternative energy, arguing that “market forces” should guide our energy policy, they are doing the bidding of the heavily subsidized fossil-fuel sector, whose tax incentives remain intact. This is politics that happens to be policy. Republicans want the Electoral College votes and Congressional seats in Kentucky (coal), Pennsylvania (fracked gas), and Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota (oil), no matter that the rest of the country would be better off with locally produced renewable energy whose efficiency keeps growing due to better and better engineering.

If there is an imported energy supply that makes sense for the Rust Belt, it’s not continued reliance on fossil fuels. Republican Congressman Chris Collins this week gave a garbled snarl about how Obama’s decision not to go forward with the Keystone Pipeline was bad for the regional economy. Nonsense: The insanely high per-barrel price of extracting oil from Alberta—the whole rationale for the pipeline was to transport Alberta oil—moots arguments for the pipeline. It’s no longer a tenable market proposition because the global price of a barrel of crude oil has fallen so far. The short-lived boom in North Dakota oil is over for the same reason. It’s just weird to hear anti-government ranters complain about Obama not spending public money, until you remember that oil is politics.

So is clean energy. If there is a Canadian energy source that makes sense for the Rust Belt, it’s going to come from the massively underutilized hydropower capacity up in the Grand Baleine complex in Quebec.

In short, there is a political calculation to Republican energy policy. It’s most definitely not a political calculation that works for this region.

Think and measure local

The Republican candidates will span as Carson delves. Expect pledges of even lower taxes from Republicans because a large plurality of the Republican base in Iowa is convinced of the neurologist’s notions, even if they like the American Berlusconi as much or better than the MD who has opined that Satan himself guided Charles Darwin’s pen.

The challenging set of facts here in the Rust Belt boil down thusly: The current upsurge in employment, which is lovely but which is mainly in low-wage and contingent employment, will stop absorbing long-marginalized sections of the workforce if a raft of new tax incentives for capital wipe out investment that produces actual jobs.

In eight of the 10 largest Rust Belt metros we’ve analyzed, manufacturing is a rapidly shriveling sector both in terms of employment and in terms of output. Manufacturing is only going to get a boost if there is a determined national policy to substitute clean for dirty energy—stimulating the kind of retooling, in the computerization and data automation drive of the 1990s, that propelled the Clinton recovery. Clean and green is not just a vibe; it’s an economic growth strategy.

In eight of the 10 largest Rust Belt metros we’ve analyzed, the already overheating real-estate industry could move toward bubble territory if any of the Republican tax regimes were instituted (except Carson’s, which would stimulate only large-scale pyramid construction).

In all 10 of the largest Rust Belt metros we’ve analyzed, infrastructure investment will remain anemic without either a sudden outbreak of bipartisanship should Congress remain Republican and the White House go to Hillary Clinton or Bernard Sanders—or with the improbable repeat of the Democratic sweep of 2008. In any case, unless there is a massive progressive tax increase, the only potential source of federal funds is revenue from some version of the existing tax system, which will yield more and more as long as the Obama recovery chugs along, with a shrinking annual deficit and a shrinking outlay for Medicare, thanks to Obamacare.

The sectors that are growing in the Rust Belt are finance, hospitality, retail and wholesale trade, professional services, and some parts of the healthcare industry. The sectors that are shrinking are all manufacturing (except in Detroit), construction (the region is still shedding people), and government services. There are tiny increments of growth in all the other sectors that the Bureau of Economic Analysis tracks (90 in all), but the pattern is what it is.

What the region will continue to experience if a Democratic President and a Republican Congressional blockade are both elected is more of what Obama hath wrought, verily. That means a nice continuation of incremental employment growth but zero change in the trajectory of the manufacturing economy (i.e., more shrinkage), no change in agriculture (which is nowhere in the Rust Belt anywhere near 1 percent of a metro economy), and no end to the ongoing federal subsidy for low-density suburban real estate development via the still-untouched, unadjusted federal highway distribution formulae. (See Rob Puentes’s many papers on the Brookings Institution website.)

No change from Washington would thus mean no end to what we reported last week: that barriers including the spatial mismatch between where the jobs are and where the out-of-work folks are will keep about half or more of the black males here out of a job.

Big change in Washington could very possibly improve things here in the Great North. A President and a Congress who are both interested in the new-energy economy could realize the vision so capably outlined in Catherine Tumber’s 2011 book Small, Gritty, and Green (MIT Press), which described how import-substitution might become a reality if energy sources were localized, efficient, and clean rather than imported, volatile, and externality-generating.

But big change could also mean a Commander-in-Chief who believes that  his job is to usher in the Rapture, or, alternatively, to do a “huge” (pronounced Fucillo-fashion, yew-dja) deal with Whomevah, including a tax policy consisting of even richer capital-gains and depreciation treatment for real estate, plus a dessert-cart of handouts to deserving bankers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and other executive tenants of the various Trump Towers scattered around various fashionable downtowns.

The “stories from the new Buffalo” story is being told in the refreshed parts of Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and in the other North Coast cities where the Obama Recovery is bringing new jobs, new downtowns, new entrepreneurship contests, and big new rebranding campaigns.

Good stuff is happening all around, and there is a virtuous cycle vibe to it that goes something like this: even though Obama has not had Congressional support for any urban policy initiatives, and even though all of America’s regions are starving for public-works dollars, we are still experiencing economic recovery.

And now, we are a year away from knowing whether the next president will keep this all going—or whether the next leader will drive this country even farther away from the Keynesian consensus that helped create, and then maintain, the greatest long-term, broadly-shared economic growth in centuries.

Nationalization of retail has happened. Sprawl has happened. Oil-dependency has happened. Over-production of infrastructure in the Rust Belt has happened. What’s unlikely to occur in a consultant rich environment is for any departure from a real estate developer-driven thought process if any Democrat wins—but without a Democrat winning, not only will the region-impoverishing cycles of sprawl continue, but the rest of the challenges of the Rust Belt will get bigger.

Remember to vote early and often.

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Bruce Fisher is visiting professor at SUNY Buffalo State and director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies.