Tag: economy

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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The Trajectory of Emergency Lands on Price Controls

The US’s serious bout of inflation – mirrored in many countries in the world – was set in motion in the first week of March 2020, like much of the rest of our ongoing emergency. This was a fortnight before the lockdowns were announced, indicating that much was going on behind the scenes. The Federal Reserve turned on a dime to provide enormous liquidity to the system, just days following the CDC’s briefing of the national press of coming lockdowns, about which the Trump administration seemed then to know next to nothing. 

The fiscal and monetary fun lasted only so long. Following the inauguration of the new president, the first round of bills started coming due, and that has continued until the present, rapidly wiping out the value of the stimulus payments that seemed to have made everyone suddenly rich without working. 

Only after two years and after some 10 months of resulting declines in purchasing power, along with supply chain breakages that left so many goods in shortage, did the Fed start to worry and raise interest rates from zero percent. That was presumably designed to sponge up the excess liquidity that had been injected directly to the veins of economic life. The Fed’s action slowed but did not end what they had unleashed to deal with the virus that was widely advertised as universally deadly even though every specialist knew otherwise. 

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“Price Gouging”: Basic Groceries Cost 21% More… Because of Biden-Harris Regime Policies

Amid reports that Kamala Harris will announce her first policy position on Friday – an attack on “greedy” grocery companies with a plan for price limits – there’s bad news for American consumers about their grocery costs.

Harris’s plan, reported by multiple outlets on Thursday, said her idea is to pursue a “price control” scheme, a tactic that repressive governments often pursue to try to make their economies look better.

It is the Post-Millennial that documented, “Americans are experiencing the consequences of increased grocery prices under the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration. The cost of food has not been this high since the Carter administration.”

The report said the cost for “basic,” “food at home” products is up 21% since Biden and Harris took over the White House.

Inflation also remains a top concern among voters this election year, with 77% seeing it as a “very important issue.”

“Grocery prices have risen significantly under Harris’s time in the White House, despite the White House’s attempts to minimize the impact of recent price increases. Harris was instrumental in the legislative agenda that resulted in this outcome. Her tie-breaking votes in the Senate were instrumental in the passage of trillions of dollars in expenditure, which many economists believe contributed to the inflation crisis, Breitbart News reported.”

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Kamala Harris Holds Rally in Cracker Box with Maybe 250 People in NC – Describes How High Food Prices Are Under Her and Old Joe… You Can’t Make This Up!

Kamala Harris held a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, where she spoke about how high food prices are under her and Old Joe’s leadership.

Kamala announced a Communist-style price control scheme to combat the inflation crisis she created.

Because of Kamala Harris, prices for meat, poultry, eggs, car insurance, housing, and bakery goods have all skyrocketed.

She blamed the stores.

On Friday, Kamala Harris admitted her failed policies have led to the worst inflation crisis in 100 years.

This is why Kamala Harris has been hiding from the press. She is painfully stupid.

“A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50%,” Harris said.

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Kamala Wants Price Controls, and It’s Not Because She Has “Good Intentions.”

The Kamala Harris campaign announced today that it will present a plan to ban “price gouging” by food suppliers. In other words, the Harris campaign plans to mandate price controls. According to UPI: 

Vice President Kamala Harris will propose a federal ban on corporate food and grocery price gouging when she lays out her policies in a North Carolina campaign speech Friday.

According to the campaign, the proposal against price gouging is part of the larger Harris economic policy platform she plans to roll out publicly at a Friday campaign rally in Raleigh.

“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”

Directly addressing soaring meat prices, Harris will focus on corporate consolidation in that market as one reason meat prices are so high.

Get ready for rising prices and shortages in meat and other groceries, because that’s where laws against “price gouging”—which are price controls—lead.

We know this because it’s happened before in the United States. In the 1970s, thanks to years of big-time federal spending on wars and welfare programs, the US abandoned its gold obligations under the Bretton Woods system, and Nixon closed the gold window.

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The Harris Campaign Will Base Its Platform on Biden’s Fake Economic Accomplishments

Later this week, Kamala Harris is expected to break her campaign’s strange silence about policy by unveiling much of her economic platform. The vice president is scheduled to first join President Joe Biden for an event in Maryland on Thursday about “the progress they are making to lower costs for the American people” and then to deliver a speech about her own economic platform on Friday.

The Harris campaign clearly intends to continue spinning the Biden administration’s economic record as a success, and now to frame Harris as instrumental to that success. But the accomplishments that the president and vice president are set to celebrate this week are not real.

Biden and Harris entered office in January of 2021. The country was almost a year into the pandemic, and the economy was a disaster. President Donald Trump had abandoned any semblance of economic conservatism and ushered through two of the largest spending bills in U.S. history: the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in March of 2020 and a $900 billion Covid-related addendum to the annual omnibus spending bill in December of 2020 in addition to several other expensive measures and interventions.

The scale of government spending unleashed during Trump’s last year was unheard of, but was declared necessary because governors nationwide had shut down most of the economy in response to the virus. Production ground to a halt in the spring of 2020 for weeks, even months. The federal government flooded the economy with trillions of dollars — most of which were freshly printed by the Fed — to hide and delay the devastating economic impact of the lockdowns.

When Biden and Harris came into office in January of 2021, they quickly got to work expanding on what Trump had already done. In March of that year, they helped pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

In the following months, the Administration then cooked up and passed an infrastructure law and the so-called CHIPS and Science Act. They then hit setbacks later in the year when the administration failed to secure enough votes for its flagship Build Back Better agenda, and then in mid-2022 when the country was slammed by the worst price inflation in half a century.

The price inflation was the obvious consequence of the government injecting trillions of new dollars into the economy at the same time government lockdowns were restricting production. But while that was the fault of both the Trump and Biden administrations, the American public understandably pinned most of the blame on the man currently in the Oval Office.

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Castro writ large: Kamala Harris declares war on wreckers and hoarders

If you thought the economy couldn’t get worse under Joe Biden, wait ’til you get a load of what Kamala Harris has in store for it.

According to The Hill:

Vice President Harris on Friday will outline a series of economic policy proposals as part of her presidential campaign, including a call for a federal ban on corporate price-gouging.

Harris will deliver remarks in North Carolina, a battleground state in November, where her campaign said she will focus on plans to lower the cost of groceries. The vice president will say that soaring meat prices in particular have contributed to a spike in grocery bills, and she will call out corporate consolidation in the market.

Those meat hike price rises, like everything else, including the price of oil, are the direct result of government overspending and money-printing that have brought us inflation. Harris proposes to control these prices, as if any business raising prices is “greedy,” cracking down on what the Bolsheviks used to call “hoarders and wreckers.”

But inflation and the interest rate hikes used to control it, hit every aspect of the economy, not just groceries, from rents to housing stock, to medical care, to credit card rates, to consumer goods. And they are all the function of too much money chasing too few goods, which is why prices go up.

On everything, everywhere. Inflation, as Milton Friedman has stated, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

You get rid of inflation the way President Javier Milei of Argentina did, by stopping the government spending.

But Kamala Harris is unlikely to know where Argentina is, let alone learn from its experiences, both good and bad, and the rest of her economic plan is to spend trillions more on child care.

Eat your heart out, Evita, Kamala is getting out the government credit card, and stealing the jewels off the necks of the theatre-goers.

Her basic idea, though, is lifted straight out of the book of Lenin.

Kamala Harris has proposed a sweeping price controls, supposedly to cut inflation at the grocery stores. The inflation wracking the rest of the economy, from housing prices, to medical care, to credit card interest rates, would not be addressed, just groceries would, but who’s to say she won’t solve those problems the same way?

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Thousands Of Businesses Are Going Bankrupt, But The Economy Is “Fine”

Businesses are declaring bankruptcy at a much faster rate than they did last year.  Thousands upon thousands of once thriving businesses are failing, but this just must be another sign that the economy is “fine”.  No matter how bad the numbers get, we are assured that the people running things have everything under control and that the outlook for the future is wonderful.  Of course I understand that this is an election year and virtually everyone is trying to put their own unique spin on things.  But there is no possible way that you can make numbers like these look good…

Personal and business bankruptcy filings rose 16.2 percent in the twelve-month period ending June 30, 2024, compared with the previous year.

According to statistics released by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, annual bankruptcy filings totaled 486,613 in the year ending June 2024, compared with 418,724 cases in the previous year.

Business filings rose 40.3 percent, from 15,724 to 22,060 in the year ending June 30, 2024. Non-business bankruptcy filings rose 15.3 percent to 464,553, compared with 403,000 in the previous year.

Read that last line again.

Business bankruptcy filings were up by more than 40 percent in just one year.

But don’t worry.

Everything is “fine”.

Sadly, more businesses continue to file for bankruptcy with each passing day.  Earlier this week, I was saddened to learn that even Avon has been forced to file for bankruptcy…

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Under Biden, More Government Jobs Than Factory Jobs

Although the US is considered a capitalist country, there are now more government employees than factory workers. President Biden claims to have created more jobs than any other president, yet the sector with the largest job gains was government, while manufacturing was near the bottom. The US currently has 23 million government workers compared to just 13 million factory workers. Out of the entire workforce of 268.6 million, government jobs account for 8.5% of total employment in the US. In Austria, a country that is much more socialist than the US, government employment makes up only 3.9% of the workforce.

The key difference between a factory worker and a government employee is that a factory worker contributes directly to the economy. In the first quarter of 2024, manufacturers contributed $2.87 trillion to the U.S. economy. Manufacturing, not government, is also a major attractor of foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2023, U.S. manufacturing attracted $2.2 trillion in FDI, accounting for about 40% of the total $5.39 trillion in FDI.

FDI is another area where the government sector impact on the economy differs from manufacturing. When the government prints money, it leads to a decrease in the value of the dollar due to increased supply, which drives inflation. In contrast, FDI involves foreign investors buying U.S. dollars to invest in domestic companies, which increases demand for the dollar, raises its value, and helps to curb inflation.

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