Tag: economy

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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Punitive Trade Sanctions by Kamala’s Team Have Created an Alternate World Economy and Stolen American Jobs

One benefit of being the World Reserve Currency and the largest economy is the ability to emplace sanctions or control measures on uncooperative nations.  This has worked for many years, but China and Russia can work out complex scenarios to avoid American sanctions faster than the U.S. Government and its Allies can emplace new measures.

In May 2024, President Putin conducted a visit to China to meet President Xi.  Out of this visit came a Chinese/Russia language statement that was filled with six references to a “New Era” in the word.  The real meaning of the term “New Era” from the statement is a world environment without the dominance of the American led, world economic system.  In June, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Russia’s VTB Bank, the Russian bank with a major Shanghai, China branch to help restrict the flow of war material to Russia.

But in May since Putin’s visit to China and pre-dating the U.S. Treasury move, specially authorized new banks were already being set up in Chinese border regions which allowed Russian firms to open non-resident accounts (NRA) with Chinese banks, a financial ju-jitsu that largely nullified the new American Sanctions when they were emplaced in June.  A brilliant tactical maneuver by China and Russia that anticipated the American targeting of VTB Bank.  More evidence that plodding and laborious US control measures were being neutralized before they were even in place.

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Why Did America Give Away Its Manufacturing Jobs?

Not long ago a couple of publishers asked about my memoirs. I told them I had no interest. Memoirs are an enormous undertaking, especially when your files haven’t been organized for the purpose. Moreover, many of mine have been discarded in moves. When you have lived as long as I have and been involved in so many major issues, files are a voluminous collection. Moreover, I have always had a jaundiced eye toward memoirs, being unsure whether they are an exercise in egotism.

In past times I think memoirs, even if they were attempts to control the narrative, something done for us today by the CIA and woke media and universities, still made information available that otherwise would have died with the person. I find this a bit sobering as there is a great deal of information that is going to die with me.

Despite all the winnowing of my files, I still have 25 crates that if I did nothing else for one year I might get through. To organize the information, I would need at least two assistants. I have barely touched the crates, and already I have found important matters long forgotten.

In 2004 NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and I opened a New Year with a jointly authored column in the New York Times. We raised the offshoring issue. American manufacturing jobs and the tech jobs of American professionals were being sent to Asia. We posed the question that if jobs offshoring was free trade, as economists claimed, was free trade any longer in America’s interest? My position was that jobs offshoring is a contradiction of free trade–more later–and Schumer was still in his idealistic period when he was concerned about the displacement of American labor by foreign labor in the production of goods and services that Americans consumed.

Our article caused a firestorm. The Brookings Institution in Washington called a conference and asked us to come and defend our position. C-Span broadcast the conference live and rebroadcast it a number of times. Schumer and I carried the day.

Delighted with the publicity, Schumer suggested a follow-up article. The NY Times was eager. We began a draft, and then it went cold. My explanation is that Wall Street, which was committed to jobs offshoring, got to Schumer and explained campaign contributions to him.

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Socialism, Not US Sanctions, Ruined the Venezuelan Economy

US sanctions against Venezuela are barbaric and immoral. But, they are not responsible for the economic collapse that has transpired in Venezuela over the past twenty years. Yes, the sanctions have further reduced the standard of living in Venezuela, and the burden of relative impoverishment caused by the sanctions has fallen hardest on those at the lowest end of the socio-economic ladder.

However, the effects of these US-imposed sanctions have not been nearly broad enough to be responsible for the general collapse of economic conditions that we now see in that country.

It is important to make this distinction because defenders of Venezuela’s socialist economic policies have repeatedly attempted to claim that sanctions are the primary reason for the country’s economic collapse.

Why do the socialist apologists claim this? It’s so they can make the case—as socialists are always eager to do—that socialism would be a boon for everyone’s standard of living if only it weren’t for the interference of foreign states like the US.

The truth, however, is that socialist policies like those practiced in Venezuela—widespread expropriation of private businesses coupled with vast wealth redistribution and government dominance of major industry sectors—are more than enough to destroy any polity’s economy. It is not necessary for Washington to intervene.

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Car Repos Rise 23% YoY

The private debt crisis is becoming apparent in America after car repossessions jumped 23% during the first half of 2024. Data shows that 1.6 million Americans will have their car repossessed by the bank before the end of the year, a slight increase from the 1.5 million autos repossessed in 2023 and a drastic upturn from the 1.1 million in 2021.

Obviously, the cost of purchasing a car have drastically risen with inflation, interest hikes, and supply chain shortages. Americans simply cannot afford new autos and car dealerships can do nothing to entice purchases. New car inventory in the US rose 36% this year, close to February 2021 levels before the supply chain crisis put a dent in imports. Yet, the average list price of a new car is $49,096 and far more than the average American can afford. The average new vehicle will sit in a dealer’s lot for 65 days, a 41% annual increase.

Dealerships are hardly asking for a downpayment these days unless someone has horrid credit. Even putting a few grand down will only take off about $20 per monthly payment. The average new car costs about $735 monthly based on data from Experian, and $523 monthly on used models. The average American simply is not educated in finance. Autos are behind mortgages in the largest share of personal household debt and there is a portion of the population who do not understand what they can actually afford.

The average American now borrows around $40,634 for new vehicles and $26,073 for used vehicles. About 9.2% of all consumer debt is through autos alone.

There was that viral story from April of a woman purchasing a Chevy Tahoe for $80,000 – without factoring in the interest on all household vehicles. Her husband purchased 2020 GMC Sierra 1500 AT4 for $78,000 in August 2022 and she simply could not understand why the payments on the truck were more than on the Tahoe. Well, the husband’s 14% rate on the vehicle placed their monthly payment or the truck $1,600. I recalled reading comments suggesting the family simply let the bank repo one of the cars as if that could be a valid option for personal finance.

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The Trigger For WWIII Just Arrived – What Are The Implications For Americans?

If the year of 2024 has proven anything so far, it’s that our worries about the potential outbreak of WWIII are absolutely reasonable. The skeptics making accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “doom and gloom” have been proven wrong yet again. The geopolitical atmosphere is turning sour fast.

I still don’t think a lot of people realize how truly volatile the situation is globally right now. From my point of view, WWIII has already begun, at least in economic terms.

Let’s not forget the fact that Ukraine is essentially a proxy for all of NATO against Russia. And, the situation in the Middle East is about to become much worse. Because of the alliances involved and the fragile nature of global energy exports there is a danger of systemic collapse should a wider war break out between Israel and multiple Arab nations. It appears that such a war is imminent.

But why should Americans care? It’s pretty simple – War spurs shortages, and shortages in the middle of a stagflationary crisis are a very bad thing.

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Law and State Coercion: The Liberating Effects of Free Markets

Many who support state regulation of free markets claim that they are not against free markets, just against unregulated free markets. They argue that regulation is needed to mitigate the harm that may be suffered during market participation, such as people working long hours for low wages or suffering racial discrimination. As Ronald Hamowy explains in his introduction to Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty,” these arguments were influential in the rise of both welfare socialism and national socialism:

“It was generally thought that only through vigorous government intervention was it possible to forestall the more destructive aspects of unbridled capitalism, which, if left unchecked, would bring privation and misery to the great mass of people. Equally important, only government direction could galvanize and coordinate the productive facilities of a nation so as to minimize waste and maximize wealth creation.”

The premise that free markets require some form of regulation, so that the debate only concerns how much regulation is needed, strikes many people as superficially reasonable: This premise seems to call merely for moderation, balance, mitigation of harm and the absence of excess. This is usually seen as the basic role of law and regulation. Walter Williams explains that “people have always sought to use laws to accomplish what they cannot accomplish through voluntary, peaceable exchange” in the belief that if free markets do not yield their preferred outcomes, they can achieve those outcomes through law and regulation.

Politicians of all stripes uphold this premise, debating only what types of interventions are required and which should take priority. There is widespread consensus among social scientists on the need for a welfare state, with debate only concerning the precise form of welfare schemes. As Hamowy observes, many intellectuals gave Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” a frosty reception because it challenged their belief in the importance of the welfare state and market regulation: “Intellectuals in both Europe and the United States appear to have remained wedded to the view that an extensive welfare state was necessary to insure economic stability and the public’s social welfare and that any defense of free markets bordered on the crackpot, unworthy of comment.”

In the field of labor market regulation, interventions are not limited to protecting workers from privation and misery. Regulations may also be designed to protect vested interests, such as preventing entry into the market by participants who enjoy what is seen as an unfair competitive advantage, or designed for racial protectionism, to prevent demographic encroachment by other races.

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