Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, takes a number of positions, particularly on economic issues, that are directly at odds with those held dear by the conservative movement.

A great example is Trump’s apparent embrace of hiking the minimum wage. Although he has not (yet) endorsed an increase as great as the $12 touted by Hillary Clinton and the $15 pushed by Bernie Sanders and other labor advocates, Trump has said he would support a hike to get the national pay floor to at least $10, an idea that conservatives view as anti-market anathema.

On trade, Trump is solidly to the left of Clinton. While the Democratic nominee has attempted to position herself as a skeptic of trade deals that she enthusiastically embraced in the past, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump has been an avowed foe of free trade deals that he blames for the departure of U.S. jobs. Similar to left-wing voices, such as Sanders, Trump has regularly suggested the federal government take a hardline against companies that move jobs abroad.

Trump’s pronouncements on health care and entitlements have been contradictory and confusing, but they are consistent in that they don’t include the anti-government rhetoric that typifies Republican discourse on health care. He has promised not to cut Medicare or Social Security and has suggested at various times that he will provide universal health coverage, at one point saying “the government will pay for it.”

Finally, Trump has proposed a massive infrastructure plan (ranging from $500 billion to half a trillion dollars) that echoes the federal stimulus package that President Obama signed into law over vociferous Republican opposition during his first 100 days in office in 2009.

“Trump is actually running to the left of Hillary Clinton, who, amid a laundry list of big-ticket liberal spending plans in her acceptance speech last week, only plans to spend $275 billion on infrastructure,” writes Jeffrey Tobin, an anti-Trump conservative, in Commentary magazine.

Clinton, however, has unveiled a number of far more specific liberal-leaning economic policies.

Among the proposals she has highlighted is an expanded family leave policy that would require employers to provide employees with up to 12 weeks of leave with two-thirds pay.

She has also floated a proposal to give employers a tax break in return for sharing profits with employees. It would offer companies a rebate worth 15 percent of the amount that was shared with workers. The Economist, a British magazine known for moderate, market-oriented economic policy, writes that the policy is “less ambitious than it might appear.”

“But the rebate lasts for only two years, and would be phased out for high-income earners,” it notes. “It seems unlikely that such tinkering would have much of an effect.”

Instant Insights /

Trump and Clinton not so different on wages, economy

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