Economist Pours Cold Water on Kamala Harris’ Explanation for Inflation
It's sheer ignorance from her. Governments control the money supply so the government has to be to blame for any across-the-board inflation
Vice President Kamala Harris blamed price-gouging for high food prices, though experts say Biden administration policies are to blame for the high cost of living and for inflation.
“I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food,” Harris said Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina. “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.”
“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting continued. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”
But price-gouging is not the reason prices have gone up, according to EJ Antoni, a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation.
“The prices that businesses are paying have gone up by the same percentage that our prices have,” Antoni told The Daily Signal. “So, all of the cost increases that businesses have faced, they’re simply just passing them on to consumers, and that’s why we’re all paying more.”
Harris highlighted grocery store price increases since 2020, shortly before the Biden administration took office.
“A lot a loaf bread cost 50% more today than it did before the [COVID-19] pandemic,” she said. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.”
The Biden administration is at fault for the increased prices, not food companies, Antoni said.
“The government spending, borrowing, and printing trillions of dollars that it didn’t have to finance it all, that’s what devalued the dollar,” Antoni said. “That’s what caused these tremendous shocks to interest rates that have so distorted the economy and caused so much havoc in supply chains and created all of these additional costs for businesses.”
The vice president promised, if elected, to lower prices by increasing competition in the food industry.
“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” Harris said. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”
Antoni wonders why Harris thinks she has to wait until her first day as president to address high prices, when she has been in office for three-and-a-half years.
Harris boasted economic improvement since the Biden administration took office in January 2021.
“We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history, and today, by virtually every measure, our economy is the strongest in the world,” the Democrat said.
The Biden administration did not solve an economic problem, Antoni said. They created a problem, and allowed it to run its course.
“Inflation is down—after they ran it up to 40-year highs,” Antoni said. “It still is more than twice what it was when they took office. The problem is not quite as bad as it was before, but it’s still bad.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/kamala-harris-blames-price-gouging-high-cost-living-biden/
**************************************************Trump Can’t Allow Kamala to Be the Candidate of Change
Joe Biden made Donald Trump feel fresh and vital.
No matter how commonplace Trump’s tropes and mode of campaigning had become, they seemed compelling compared to the bleached-out president of the United of States who had become a shell of himself.
With the Trump-Biden contrast no longer relevant, the former president is operating in a new, much less forgiving environment. Kamala Harris wants to run a youth-vs.-age and future-vs.-past campaign against Trump, and she has some chance of making it work.
Against Biden, Trump represented the past, but also change. Against Harris, he’s potentially just the past.
It’s not “old” as a matter of age that’s the issue, although all those concerns are now about Trump. Ronald Reagan was old when he took office, but was offering a complete change of direction in policy and exuded a youthful optimism and self-confident patriotism. The problem for Trump is “old” as a matter of feeling familiar, tired and played out.
The Mar-a-Lago press conference last week was a typical, nay, stereotypical, Trump event — Trump looked commanding against a vivid backdrop of American flags, but how many times have we seen that image?
He was a bit of everything — on message and off message, confident and defensive, charming and insulting, and so it went. Again, how many times have we watched it?
Even Trump’s outrages aren’t that surprising. That he went with the “Kamala suddenly became black” line of attack wasn’t exactly predictable, but nor is this kind of thing unexpected.
And, of course, we’ve repeatedly experienced cycles of hope for a new, more disciplined candidate dashed by Trump’s insistence on doing it his way.
Again, none of this mattered so much against a doddering 81-year-old man who a vast majority of the public thought incapable of serving another four years. Biden was the past in everything he said and did.
For her part, Kamala Harris may not really be hip, but she is hipper than Trump. She’s certainly energetic enough for a full slate of campaigning, and she’s presenting herself as a third force: neither Biden nor Trump, a politician with an entirely new “vibe.”
Harris has another advantage. It wasn’t truly possible to cover up Biden’s weakness. Even if Biden wasn’t doing many interviews, he had to be out in public — at international meetings, at White House events and the like. No matter how much the Democrats insisted everything was OK, he could be seen stumbling, wandering and losing his train of thought.
With Harris, Republicans might (for good reason) say that she will lose herself in word-salad incoherence upon her first contact with a challenging interview, but there is no way to establish it without such an interview.
On the teleprompter, she seems just fine. She’s pointed, amusing, determined and lifted by enthusiastic crowds.
Most importantly, Trump was winning a change election against Joe Biden. Now, he’s essentially tied with Harris on who will bring positive change. The new CNBC poll had Harris at 39% on this question and Trump at 38%.
There is plenty for Trump to work with to pull ahead on this metric. People remember his record in office more or less fondly, and Harris has been an integral part of a failed administration and now embraces almost all of Biden’s policies.
This isn’t a case that makes itself, though. It’s not enough simply not to be Kamala Harris, the way it was not to be Joe Biden.
Trump is going to have to make focused attacks that break through and aren’t lost in the haze of pointless controversies. This presents a tactical question: If the choice is between an overly controlled candidate who is relentlessly on message and an ill-disciplined candidate who is off message, is it clear that the former (Harris) is worse than the latter (Trump)?
Trump has a new challenge — his opponent is no longer an aged incumbent president who has worn out his welcome.
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How Gold Can Save the Dollar
Can we save the dollar before central banking kills it?
Yes. It’s surprisingly easy. And, as you might expect, it involves gold.
As federal deficits hit 8% of gross domestic product—unprecedented in peacetime—and our national debt hits $35 trillion—unprecedented in the history of man—even the central bankers realize that this isn’t sustainable.
That we are coming to the day our paper money utopia crumbles.
Historically, from Song Dynasty China to Weimar Germany, when paper dies we return to hard money. Because hard money is the only way to finally kill the money printer.
Happily, we can actually do this without the crash.
The other day Fox Business financial journalist Charles Payne sent me a quote by 1970s Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who wrote, paraphrasing: It is a sobering fact that central banking has led to more inflation, not less. We did better with the 19th-century gold standard, with passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with “free banking.” The power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money and, ultimately, the power to create is the power to destroy.
This is a fairly striking admission of failure from—by all accounts—the best Fed chair we’ve had since 1913.
A central bank is indeed an extraordinary thing: It’s a privately owned, federally licensed counterfeiter the regime can use to seize literally everything in the world by printing money.
It’s why we have inflation and recessions. It’s why we have Wall Street bailouts and a colossal national debt. It’s why the government has grown to dominate our economy and our lives.
In contrast, under the gold standard we had zero cumulative inflation over 124 years. We had a federal government that was seven times smaller as a percent of GDP. In 1913, we had a national debt of 8% of GDP. Today, it’s 140%—in fact, it’s rising by almost 8% per year.
So how do we get back? Simple: Back the dollar with gold at today’s price—$2,500 per ounce—then mandate that if gold flows out, the Treasury has to buy it back in before the Treasury does anything else—before it pays Ukraine, before it pays interest on the national debt.
Presto.
Why? Because if they keep printing money it creates inflation and gold goes to, say, $2,600 an ounce.
Now, people can make free money by trading $2,500 for an ounce of gold from the Federal Reserve and reselling it for $2,600 on the open market.
Gold flows out, now Treasury has to buy it in at 26.
In other words, they lose money on the money printer.
That means the Fed and Treasury are forced to keep money creation low enough for zero percent inflation—for stable gold.
This means interest rates above inflation—no more paying hedge funds to borrow. It means no more quantitative easing to buy up rich people’s assets, leaving inflation for the poor. It means no more Wall Street bailouts. And, above all, it chokes off the spending cancer of the welfare-warfare industrial complex.
So what’s next? Neither the gold standard, bitcoin standard, or full reserve banking are remotely on the bingo card for the foreseeable future. And, historically, it takes a crisis to put them there.
But it’s important to remember how easy it is to solve our financial catastrophe if and when we get a politician brave enough to try.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/how-gold-saves-the-dollar/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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