Tag: economy

Dems Scramble To Walk Back Harris’ Price Control Scheme

Democrats are in damage control mode after Kamala Harris’ communist price control scheme received a harsh rebuke – including from the Washington Post, which characterized it as “populist gimmicks.“

Facing pressure to defend the plan, Democratic lawmakers are downplaying it as a pipe dream that has no chance of passing Congress, Politico reports.

The plan, unveiled as part of Harris’ first big economic policy speech, has become a focal talking point for Donald Trump and allies, who continue to frame it as “communist price controls.” Meanwhile, food industry officials and some left-of-center economists have warned that price controls could be detrimental, according to the report.

Central to the plan is a call for congress to pass the first-ever federal price gouging ban on food and grocery stores – mirroring legislation reintroduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) earlier this year, for which Warren was taken to task by CNBC‘s Joe Kernen.

Now, six Congressional Democrats and five Democratic aides tell Politico that they’ve been privately telling critics that the plan isn’t viable – and is instead a messaging tactic to to divert blame over inflation from the Biden-Harris administration.

Even many Democrats remain skeptical, or at least uncertain about how Harris would carry out her proposal, if elected. They’re still working on getting details, but many have left that for after the DNC. -Politico

“It’s clear to me these are very general, very lofty goals,” said one of the Democratic lawmakers.

“I honestly still don’t know how this would work,” said a second Democratic lawmaker.

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It Hasn’t Worked Once, So Why Would A Politician Go All-In On Price Controls Now?

August 15th was the anniversary of the infamous “Nixon Shock”, when excessive spending and trade deficits had governments on the ropes, as prices climbed relentlessly, inflation soared into the double digits, while economic growth stalled.

In 1971 of that year, Nixon “temporarily” suspended convertibility of the US dollar for gold (still in effect), while simultaneously proclaiming a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices across the United States.

The stagflationary ’70s also saw Trudeau the 1st enact “The Anti-Inflation Act of 1975”, with his infamous “6 and 5” measures (a 6% cap on wage increases with a 5% cap on prices was supposed to put 1% back into the pocket of the peasants).

None of this worked, and as the lumpenpublic were mulched by higher prices and growing government, gold served as a barometer to it all – soaring from $35/oz at the time of the Nixon Shock to $850/oz in 1980 (that all-time high still won’t be exceeded in inflation adjusted terms until gold cracks about $2,580).

It took Paul Volcker  to get inflation under control with double-digit interest rates – (when the news came that he had been elevated from President of the New York Fed under Gerald Ford to Chairman by Jimmy Carter, Volcker’s wife burst into tears).

Today, 50 years later with a monetary regime that makes the ’70s look austere, double-digit interest rates are simply not an option – we’ve just seen a 5-sigma event nearly blow up the global monetary system from the BoJ nudging interest rates from the zero bound to 25bps.

With an unprecedented levels of monetary expansion and debt levels somewhere beyond nosebleed elevations, policy-makers and central bankers are trapped.

This is why we’re seeing a resurgence in popular rhetoric around the idea of price controls – everywhere from Jagmeet Singh here in Canada, who blames grocery store CEOs for inflation, to Dem nominee and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, channeling him with promises of food price controls as part of her election campaign.

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Harris’s Price Control Plan is Worse Than You Think

The Myth of the Eternal Return is the title of a 1954 tome by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, although many other deep thinkers, from Pythagoras to Nietszche, have voyaged into the same poetic and philosophic recesses. 

My task is much shallower: To show how old, bad, ideas keep recurring in American politics. Yes, I bear witness to The Truth of Infernal Return. As with bad pennies and bad breath, it’s no myth that our politics are infested with nefarious ideas that never die and eternal lie. As with some Lovecraftian daemon, they await their infernal comeback. 

Case in point: Kamala Harris’s August 16 announcement of her plan for price controls—that being a fair way to describe federal monitoring of “price gouging.” Harris has revived one of the worst ideas from the stagflationary (stagnation + inflation) 1970s. More on that later, but let’s recall other bad ideas that have lamentably rebounded: 

First, unnecessary foreign war. Into this Baby Boomer, memories of the bloody futility of the Vietnam War are seared. So when the North Vietnamese finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, my teenage self said, “Well, at least the U.S. will never make that mistake again.” Which only proves I had a lot to learn. As we all know, less than three decades later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, a military operation that made the Vietnam War look prudential. 

Today, 21 years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”—the most grimly hilarious pronunciamento since Vietnam’s “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—we still have troops in Iraq, which is now dominated, of course, by Iran. So what, now, are those Americans doing there? They aren’t looking for WMDs, and they aren’t building democracy. Instead, they are fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh—or whatever new bogeyman emerges from the Middle East’s tireless terror-meme generator. 

According to reports, the U.S. has 3,400 troops in Iraq and adjacent Syria, but only a fool would vouch for the accuracy of that number, given officialdom’s history of fibbing, the slippery X-factor of contractors—and perhaps some other number-hiding shell-game that we’ll learn about only in the next investigative scoop. 

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Kamala Harris’s updated truly lousy jobs report and stock market hysteria, today

Really, we just need to alert readers to this “development” (not really) yesterday and overnight, from Bloomberg:

Fed Confronts Up to a Million US Jobs Vanishing in Revision

US job growth in the year through March was likely far less robust than initially estimated, which risks fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve is falling further behind the curve to lower interest rates. 

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. economists expect the government’s preliminary benchmark revisions on Wednesday to show payrolls growth in the year through March was at least 600,000 weaker than currently estimated — about 50,000 a month.

So that’s Bloomberg this morning. We’d like to know which “economists” are downplaying the Biden-Harris feints from labor on what our jobs are doing, and where they are going.

We already know that any “gains” in jobs, for years now, has been because of part-time hires, federal hires, and illegal migrant hires. The Labor Department is not forthcoming on these realities, either.

The Business Times offers this analysis vis-à-vis implications for any change in interest rates precipitated by a more honest picture:

US JOB growth in the year through March was likely far less robust than initially estimated, which risks fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve is falling further behind the curve to lower interest rates.

Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo economists expect the government’s preliminary benchmark revisions on Wednesday (Aug 21) to show payrolls growth in the year through March was at least 600,000 weaker than currently estimated – about 50,000 a month.

While JPMorgan Chase forecasters see a decline of about 360,000, Goldman Sachs indicates it could be as large as a million.

Have our federal information minders dropped the ball, or has Kamala forgotten to take care of her fraudulent economic/finance picture? Here’s more:

‘A large negative revision would indicate that the strength of hiring was already fading before this past April,’ Wells Fargo economists Sarah House and Aubrey Woessner said in a note last week. That would make ‘risks to the full employment side of the Fed’s dual mandate more salient amid widespread softening in other labor market data.’

However, Kamala may not need to overly worry, as we won’t have anything close to the truth until after the election:

The government’s preliminary benchmark projection will be followed by final revisions that are incorporated into the January employment report to be released in February.

That’s February 2025, folks. If Trump is in by then, he’ll be fixing it. If Kamala’s the man, she won’t notice it anyway.

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Secretary of Commerce Says She ‘Doesn’t Believe’ Fact That 818,000 Jobs Have Disappeared Under Biden/Harris White House

When Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo was asked if the 818,000 jobs supposedly created by the Biden/Harris White House which later turned out to not exist was a “liability” for Kamala’s campaign, she said she ‘didn’t believe’ the numbers.

Yes, really.

In a shock announcement yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the nonfarm payroll figure had been revised down by 818,000, meaning the U.S. economy created that number of fewer jobs than originally reported in the 12-month period through March 2024.

The actual job growth was therefore “nearly 30% less than the initially reported 2.9 million from April 2023 through March of this year,” reported CNBC, the largest downward revision in 15 years.

Despite the number being a manifestly provable fact announced by the government itself, Raimondo claimed it was all a lie invented by Donald Trump.

“When you hear that do you think these new numbers could potentially be a liability for this campaign?” she was asked by an ABC News reporter.

“No, when I hear that, first of all, I don’t believe it, because I’ve never heard Donald Trump say anything truthful,” responded Raimondo.

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Harris Releases Economic Plans

Vice President Kamala Harris described her economic agenda Friday in a North Carolina campaign speech. Harris’s proposals were widely described as “populist,” and also drew criticism from across the political spectrum.

Mirroring a policy championed by conservatives and pro-natalists such as Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), Harris also announced support for a child tax credit of $6,000 for newborns, and otherwise raising the tax credit for families to $3,000, where it was temporarily during Covid, from $2,000.

In another populist policy duplicating a proposal from the Trump campaign, Harris advocated ending taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. 

On housing, Harris intends for the government to create a $40 billion fund for boosting construction, and for the construction of 3 million new housing units over the next four years. Harris also intends to provide $25,000 of assistance to first-generation homebuyers and tax-credits for first-time homebuyers.

One of the most controversial parts of Harris’s economic proposals came when she announced that, if elected president, she intends to use the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on companies that are engaging in price gouging. Many have interpreted this as a call for price controls, a task possibly beyond the legal powers of the FTC

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Back to the Future With Price Controls

Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is demonstrating why monetary debasement has always been a favorite way for government officials to plunder the citizenry. Rather than focusing on the Federal Reserve as the root cause of prices rising across society, she’s blaming rising food prices on grocery-store owners. Consequently, she says that if she is elected president, she’ll get a federal “anti-gouging” law enacted that prevents grocery stores from raising prices.

In other words, she’s going to impose price controls, which inevitably means that we are going to have to deal with shortages of everything in grocery stores that has a price control imposed on it.

Of course, this is what governments have done since the invention of the printing press. Debasing the currency by printing ever-increasing quantities of money and then blaming the resulting rising prices on greedy, rapacious, evil, profit-seeking, capitalist swine has always been the way that government officials plunder the citizenry without having the citizenry figure out what the government is doing to them.

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Thanks To The Cost Of Living Crisis, U.S. Household Debt Has Soared To The Highest Level Ever Recorded

Our entire economy is fueled by debt.  In fact, if going into more debt was suddenly banned the U.S. economy would instantly hit a brick wall.  For the vast majority of us, our lifestyles simply cannot be funded by what we actually make.  So we use debt to bridge the difference, and this has particularly been true during the cost of living crisis.  Total household debt has now reached a grand total of 17.8 trillion dollars, and we continue to pile up more with no end in sight…

A quarterly report published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household credit and debt found that between the first quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2024, credit card debt surged 48.1% while household debt — which includes mortgages and auto loans — rose by 21.6%.

In dollar terms, credit card debt rose from $770 billion in early 2021 to $1.14 trillion in the most recent quarter, while household debt increased from $14.64 trillion to $17.8 trillion in the same period.

I did not realize that credit card debt had risen by more than 48 percent since the first quarter of 2021.

That is extremely alarming, because it indicates that millions upon millions of households are literally living on the edge of financial disaster.

And the fact that delinquency rates have been climbing just underscores how serious things have become…

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First Rule of Famine Club

One of the worst things governments can do when things go badly — but always seem to do — is make price controls. Gas on fire.

In case of actual food emergency, police military, thugs, and hungry people, go house to house, warehouse to warehouse, farm to farm — and seize food. People become expert at hiding food.

Farms often are picked over by plagues of locust-people. Farmers stop farming…

Hoarders, speculators, and preppers are different sorts, but they all get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Hoarders who buy everything they can get at last minute are a problem.

Preppers actually REDUCE the problem because they are not starving and stressing the supplies, but preppers get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Speculators, as with preppers, often buy far in advance of the problems and actually part of the SOLUTION. They buy when prices are lower and supplies are common.

Speculators can be fantastic. When prices skyrocket, speculators find a way to get their supplies to market even when they must travel far even to another country. But dirty governments run by dimwits will often call speculators “hoarders” and arrest them and seize their supplies.

Governments who often cause food emergencies always blame farmers, distributors, retailers, for price gouging and hoarding. Government price fixing, seizures, crime from government, and street thugs, causes actual production and distribution to plummet. That’s when the REAL problems start — and potatoes are worth far more than gold.

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Wealth Mobility vs. Feudal Caste System

In a free market economy, anyone with determination could “get rich.” It is what gave rise to The American Dream (e.g., a house, a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a loyal dog). This is different from the feudal societies of the past, when only certain people could ever get rich. Feudalism is a type of cronyism, feudal lords gave fealty to a king.

If the king wanted local persons “shaken down” (or shaken up), then the noble, lord, or baron would pay those common people a “visit” and he would remind them who is in charge. In return for putting fear into the hearts of the local people, the king granted noble estates. By being loyal hooligans, feudal barons were guaranteed land and riches.

But feudalism is the opposite of a free market economy. There is wealth mobility in free market economies (anyone can get rich), but wealth stability in feudalism — only cronies can ever get rich. A sign of feudalism shows up in the ratio of riches (wealth) to income. Under feudalism, held wealth dwarfs any earned income, such as wages.

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