Thursday, August 29, 2024
Time for Never Trumpers to Drop their Conservative Charade
Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, is the most liberal nominee for president in history.
She has ardently supported Medicare for All, also known as a complete federal government takeover of health care, even though she has tried to walk it back in this election cycle. Philosophically, self-proclaimed conservatives have argued vehemently against this policy and the experience of Covid should have given the practical reasons to back the rhetoric.
She is on record as opposing hydraulic fracturing and the Biden-Harris energy policy is one that makes the country more dependent upon electricity generation while ending the most reliable sources to generate electricity. With the key Electoral College state Pennsylvania being a major economic beneficiary of fracking Harris now claims to be against banning the process. GOP “leaders” claim to oppose the Green New Deal destruction of fossil fuels generation, and pretend to understand that reliance on unreliable sources of energy puts our nation at risk.
She has proposed price controls on food as a solution to inflation. You can’t find a single conservative leader in America who believes that the government can do a better job of pricing commodities than the market, and that food price controls don’t mean food shortages. Not even the Washington Post thinks this emphasis on price “gouging” is a good idea.
Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist who as the California Attorney General raided the home of an independent journalist who uncovered an elaborate business venture by Planned Parenthood to market and sell baby body parts from aborted children. Kamala Harris did not prosecute Planned Parenthood, but the journalist who uncovered and videotaped the sickening practice of selling off body parts as if aborted children were human parts manufacturers.
On taxes, she has embraced taxing unrealized capital gains. An example of an unrealized capital gain would be to impose a tax on a homeowner on any appreciation of the value of their home even though that money is only a paper gain and not in their bank account.
Also, the Tax Foundation found that Harris’ pledge to end the Trump tax cuts will mean a tax increase for most Americans. In fact, the bottom half of taxpayers would have their average tax rate raised to 4 percent from the current 3.4 percent. Married couples with two children making a joint income of $85,000 a year would see their taxes go up by $1,661 a year, the equivalent of almost 2 percent of their entire pre-tax salary for the year.
And of course, the Biden border Czarina Harris has seen 10 million illegals encountered at the border since she was given stewardship of the border crisis by President Biden. Note that this does not include the estimated 2 million illegals who got away after being observed by the Border Patrol. It is so bad that Harris is trying to deny any part in the Biden border fiasco, but not even Google can make the news clips of her appointment go away.
It is really hard to find a screwball, California idea that Harris hasn’t supported, including banning gasoline powered cars, which the Biden-Harris administration would put out of business by 2037, two years after California banned them.
All of this does not even include the Biden-Harris weaponization of the Justice Department and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, the on-going censorship and manipulation of social media platforms to promote the left’s political agenda, or her adamant opposition to the Second Amendment. In fact, it is hard to find a part of the Constitution that Harris actually supports.
Given the above, any person who endorses Kamala Harris for president can no longer call themselves a conservative in any way, shape or form. They are not. They are massive government enablers unable to get over the fact that Donald Trump defeated them in a primary election in 2016 and again in the primary of 2024.
The question that the Liz Cheneys of the world need to answer is whether they were lying when they claimed to be pro-life, support free markets, lower taxes, less federal government control, gun rights, energy independence and the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.
Even those with the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome should be able to look at the policies of Kamala Harris and reject them outright. Those with the worst cases have the option of voting third party – maybe the pot party (err, the Libertarian Party) is high enough to earn your vote. But endorsing Kamala Harris is admitting that everything you said was important no longer matters, and that you support the likely final stage of the fundamental transformation of America because … Donald Trump.
I can no longer take those seriously who have embraced the New Age Harris who rejects constitutional governance in her musings about being unburdened by the past
The very soul of America is at stake, and there is no room in the fight to preserve the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and the ideal that all are created equal endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights for those who would sacrifice our fundamental liberties because they don’t like mean tweets. Now, more than ever, in the words of Ronald Reagan, this is our time for choosing.
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/time-for-never-trumpers-to-drop-their-conservative-charade/
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JD Vance tells Kamala Harris to 'go to hell' after her campaign takes aim at Trump over Arlington incident
ERIE, Pa. — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) told Vice President Kamala Harris she “can go to hell” Wednesday if she wanted to criticize former President Donald Trump for attending a ceremony honoring the fallen 13 servicemembers who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Vance’s swipe came after the Trump campaign reportedly got into an altercation with a cemetery official at Arlington National Cemetery, who tried to stop them from filming and photographing in Section 60, the burial site for military personnel killed while fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In an interview with CNN, a spokesperson for Harris, Michael Tyler, called the incident “pretty sad” and “not surprising.”
The VP pick was asked to comment on the incident at a campaign event in Erie, Pa. when he became visibly frustrated and sniped that the Democratic presidential nominee “can go to hell” if her team wanted to use it as an opportunity to attack Trump.
He then hit back at Harris for not firing anyone responsible for the withdrawal that happened under her watch.
“The other thing that our veterans care more about is that three years ago, 13 brave innocent Americans died. And they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job and there hasn’t been a single investigation or a single firing,” he said.
“Kamala Harris is disgraceful. We want to talk about a story out of those 13 brave innocent Americans who lost their lives? It’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened. And she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?”
She “can go to hell” he scoffed.
Vance also insisted that the incident was exaggerated by the media.
“The altercation at Arlington cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, saying the Gold Star families wanted Trump there and that the incident was not an “insult” to the memories of the fallen servicemembers.
The Ohio senator said that an Arlington National Cemetery staff member “had a little disagreement with somebody” but that the media ran with it to create a “national news story.”
On Tuesday, NPR reported that two Trump campaign staff members “verbally abused and pushed” aside a cemetery official who tried to prevent staffers from filming and photographing while the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony.
A spokesperson for the Arlington National Cemetery told The Post that there was an “incident,” that a “report has been filed” and that “federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.”
The Trump team has insisted that the individual who confronted the campaign about photography was “suffering from a mental health episode” and that there was “no physical altercation as described,” communications director Steven Cheung said.
One Gold Star family member who was at the cemetery with Trump backed up the campaign’s version of events, and claimed the cemetery staff was “lying.”
“We are the ones that invited Trump. He didn’t invite himself,” Darin Hoover, the father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, told The Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“We invited him because we knew that he had our backs, he supports us. He cares about us.
“While I was there, I didn’t witness any, any physical altercation or anything like that. And quite frankly, the Arlington staff is lying. I mean, it’s just, it’s a flat-out lie,” Hoover fired back.
“We wanted the pictures to memorialize, you know, what President Trump had said and done and … that moment where he’s paying his respects to our children,” Hoover continued.
The Gold Star family member also said Trump’s support is “a far cry more than what the current administration has done” — which is “absolutely nothing.”
“The current administration wants to sweep it under the rug and make sure it stays buried,” Hoover said.
Attendees at the Erie rally, meanwhile, told The Post that Vance’s military experience and him being a Marine veteran is a positive for the Republican ticket.
Gene Seip, 69, a business owner born and raised in Erie, said that “one of the demographics he’s drawing is military people.”
Chris Knight, 68, is the head cook at a school in Corry, Pa. She brought a hard copy of Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” with her and said that she’s a fan of the senator, not just Trump.
Vance is “adding to the veterans,” she said, noting that her son was in the military and that “it’s important that we keep our kids here and only send them away if they have to go.”
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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)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Campaign lays bare debate over what it means to be a ‘real American’
JD Vance introduced himself to the nation as a son of poor Kentucky coal country with family roots going back generations. Kamala Harris introduced herself as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, one of them “a brown woman with an accent” who arrived with dreams of becoming the scientist who cured breast cancer.
These details, laid out at the two parties’ national conventions, weren’t just intended to fill in the biographies of the faintly known Republican nominee for vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Rather, they were part of the two parties’ explanations for why they would take the nation in radically different policy directions.
The two presidential campaigns, at the conventions and in other messages, have offered far different visions of what it is to be American, part of a battle over which agenda serves the nation best. To Vance, the “source of American greatness” is the bonds built over generations of people connected to their “homeland,” which he said must be defended against imported foreign labour, imported energy and trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. To Harris and her allies, the American story is often about people overcoming racial and economic hurdles, whose aspirations deserve targeted aid from the government.
Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has prominently taken up the debate over American identity by portraying Harris herself and her policies as outside the mainstream.
Deriding her economic plan as a form of Soviet-style governance, he has continually dubbed her “Comrade Kamala” and recently posted an image online casting the Democratic convention as a communist rally, with Harris as its leader. He has contended that she took on her Black identity only recently, suggesting she is deceitful in presenting herself to the public.
“He’s trying to ‘other’ Harris” – make her seem alien in her identity and values, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump. She said Harris had responded in the convention by “leaning into what it means to be an American, how American she is, how she’s a unique American story. And that’s how you overcome, I think, his attempts to ‘other’ her.”
Trump has also proposed the largest mass deportation program ever of people in the U.S. illegally, describing them as a threat to safety and the American way of life.
Vance, meanwhile, used the GOP convention to tell the story of a family rooted to the land for generations, using it to argue in part for protecting the nation’s native-born citizens and their values.
Vance talked about the cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, near his family’s ancestral home in one of the nation’s poorest counties, where he expected to be buried one day next to people born at the time of the Civil War. He put the shared history of the people there at the centre of his vision of America.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance told the Republican convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While accepting immigrants is part of the American tradition, he said, “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”
Harris’s convention speech, by contrast, leaned into the idea that her story of a first-generation, bi-racial child advancing to high office embodies America’s promise of offering opportunity to all.
Harris has proposed a sweeping package of tax cuts for parents, aid to first-time home buyers and access to capital for small-business owners that she suggested would help people who had few chances for advancement. “Opportunity is not available to everyone,” she said she learned as a child. “That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” The two party conventions also offered a more direct engagement in the battle to define American identity. When Hulk Hogan, the retired WrestleMania star, took the stage shortly before Trump accepted the GOP nomination, he wore a shirt that said “Real American.” He then explained what the term meant to him.
“I found out I was in a room full of real Americans,” he said, referring to the convention hall and the loyalty of GOP delegates to Trump. “When Donald J. Trump becomes the president of the United States, all the real Americans are going to be nicknamed Trumpites, because all the Trumpites are going to be running wild for four years,” he said.
Democrats left it to Barack Obama to give the reply. “Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them, between real Americans who of course support him and the outsiders who don’t,” the former president told his party’s convention. He urged the audience to reject that idea.
Democrats also responded by trying to paint Trump as the candidate who is outside the mainstream, given his efforts to denigrate Harris and her policies. Michelle Obama, among others, presented Harris’s life story as an example of America’s promise, rather than foreign to it. “It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life,” the former first lady said.
She added: “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be American.” The convention also put Harris’s great-nieces on stage to explain the correct way to say the candidate’s first name (it is COMM-a-lah) – an implicit rebuke to Trump, who often mispronounces the name and has said “I couldn’t care less” about doing so.
Michelle Obama went further and tried to flip the script on claims by some Trump allies – and amplified by Trump himself – that Harris is a “DEI candidate,” a claim rooted in the belief that minority groups unfairly use racial preferences to advance. She implied that it was Trump who had received special preferences based on his birth that aren’t available to others.
“We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” she said.
Vance concluded his speech by saying his family represents “generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country,” and whose commitment to the country is more concrete than an abstraction or idea. He said that “America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” whatever the colour of their skin.
Vance is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri Vance, while Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, immigrated from Slovenia.
The night after Vance spoke, Trump expanded on the details of putting those interests first, promising “massive tax cuts for workers” and new tariffs on imports, among other measures. “We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation,” Trump said.
His vision of improving America centred in large part on protecting its territorial integrity. He said he would secure the border and deport undocumented immigrants, who he said made the nation more dangerous and who squeezed Black, Latino and union workers out of their jobs. Previously, Trump had accused Biden of allowing migrants into the country to “sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.” “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America,” he said.
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Kamala Harris Never Mentioned Inflation In Her Acceptance Speech, And At This Rate, She Never Will
By Robert Romano
Upon accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2024 on Aug. 22 in President Joe Biden’s stead, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a short speech wherein she never mentioned inflation by name even though it is by far the top issue in the campaign alongside the economy among voters, according to recent polls.
She dared not.
In the most recent Economist-YouGov poll taken Aug. 17 to Aug. 20, inflation and prices still remained the top concern among voters, at 26 percent and the economy and jobs at 10 percent. Immigration is at 13 percent, health care at 9 percent, climate change at 8 percent and abortion at 8 percent.
Among those who said inflation and prices were the top issue in the campaign, Trump leads them by almost 35 points, 61.15 percent to 26.5 percent.
Elsewhere, 47 percent of voters say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. Among those voters, they break for Trump by more than 44 points, 66.8 percent to 22.5 percent.
Whereas, among those who said they were financially the same as a year ago, 37 percent, they favor Harris by 35 points, 60.8 percent to 25.7 percent. Among those who said they were better off, 15 percent, they favor Harris by more than 68 points, 79.7 percent to 11.5 percent.
That largely breaks down along party lines, with 64 percent of Republicans saying they are worse off and 29 percent of Democrats. Among independents, critically, 44 percent say they are worse off, 37 percent say about the same and 11 percent say better off. 8 percent are unsure.
Critically, 23 percent of Harris supporters say they are worse off. That could create an opening for Trump, since he is talking about the inflation and prices issue. Especially, since by every measure, personal incomes have definitely not kept up with consumer inflation even when government transfer payments are included, only increasing 18.2 percent since Feb. 2021 whereas prices are still up 18.9 percent, according to data respectively collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A good question might be what Harris can say to those who say they are the same or better off but still favor Trump, 22 percent and 4 percent, respectively, without disaffecting those of her own supporters who say they are worse off. To get there, she would need to acknowledge the weak economy.
So far, the way Democrats appear to have chosen to solve this dilemma is simply by not addressing it. But that might only go so far if economic anxiety increases as the election gets closer.
Suffice to say, if the election comes down to better off or worse off, clearly more Americans say they are worse off than better off, and could give Trump a slight edge, especially if he can persuade some of those saying they are no better off or are better off, to ask for their support to help those out who are not doing too well by taking measures to reduce costs and increase production.
And then there is all the spending that has taken place since 2021, including $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Plan for more helicopter money and another $891 billion of green subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
On April 29 at the Economic Opportunity Tour in Atlanta, Ga. Harris stated, unironically, “we are in the process of putting a lot of money in the streets of America…” Trump can ask, does that help inflation?
Trump’s advantage appears to be that he can embrace the economic reality, whereas the polls might suggest Harris might be better off — at least for now — ignoring the plight of Americans suffering through the Biden-Harris economy. For the convention, the betting appeared to be that she can skip past it, banking on enough loyal Democrats and enough independents to get her across the finish line.
It’s a gamble, but Harris won’t think incomes not keeping up with inflation matters until the polls tell her campaign it does, but by then, it might already be too late. Stay tuned
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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)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard endorses Donald Trump
I always thought she was too realistic to be a Donk
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has given Donald Trump a ringing endorsement for his White House bid, blasting her erstwhile political foe Kamala Harris in a speech in Detroit, days after party scion Robert F Kennedy Jr similarly backed the former president.
Ms Gabbard, who served as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii for eight years to 2021, praised Mr Trump, 78, for his foreign policy as president, including his courage to “meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners in the pursuit of peace”.
Speaking at a National Guard conference alongside Mr Trump, who is seeking to regain political momentum as Vice-President Ms Harris inches ahead in the polls, Ms Gabbard urged Americans to “stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power”, referring to Democrats’ alleged weaponisation of the courts to prosecute the former president.
“We can’t allow our country to be destroyed by politicians who will put their own power ahead of the interests of the American people, our freedom and our future,” she said in a speech to mark the three-year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service members were killed in a bomb blast at Kabul airport. “Kamala Harris has done this over the last 3½ years; she won’t hesitate to continue that if she is elected.”
Ms Gabbard, who along with Ms Harris unsuccessfully sought the Democrat nomination for president in 2020, has become a regular fixture on conservative media since she left the party in 2022, slamming it then as an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.
“I am proud to stand here before you today, whether Democrats or Republican or independent, if you love our country as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all we can to save our country and elect Trump and send him back to the White House,” she told the audience to rounds of applause.
Ms Gabbard, who was considered an outside chance to become Mr Trump’s vice-presidential running mate before he chose Senator JD Vance, has become an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, citing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine she argues are in part provoked and sustained by the US.
“This admin has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and brought us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before … I am confident (Mr Trump’s) first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” she said in her remarks.
Mr Trump has enlisted Ms Gabbard, 43, to help him prepare ahead of his scheduled first and possibly only debate with Ms Harris, planned to take place September 10. “He knows the issues. He is very homed in on her record in reminding voters … ‘what have you done for the last 3½ years?’ ” she told Fox last week when asked how Mr Trump’s preparation was going.
In an exchange that went viral in 2019, Ms Gabbard tore into Ms Harris during a Democrat primary debate, arguably derailing the then California senator’s first presidential bid, who like her later dropped out of the race without winning a single delegate. “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Ms Gabbard said.
Ms Gabbard’s endorsement came as Mr Trump ramps up his campaign appearances including in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week. Ms Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will launch a bus tour of South Georgia later this week, seeking to extend a political honeymoon during which the 59-year-old has secured a polling lead over Mr Trump since she replaced Joe Biden as Democrat presidential candidate.
With the two major parties’ nominating conventions finished, Ms Harris, who has yet to agree to a press conference or interview since becoming the nominee last month, is leading in the polls by 47 per cent to 43 per cent, according to the latest average by FiveThirtyEight.
Mr Kennedy, a member of America’s storied political clan, suspended his long-shot presidential bid as on Friday and endorsed Mr Trump, injecting new uncertainty into the White House race. The 70-year-old failed to get on the ballot in even half of the 50 US states and his independent candidacy featured a number of twists – including his claim to be suffering from a parasitic brain worm.
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Trump would veto national abortion ban says Vance
Smart move
Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban, his running-mate, JD Vance, said as their White House campaign tried to regain the initiative after the Democratic convention.
Vance also sought to turn the focus of the election back on to higher food and housing prices as Trump’s pollsters warned of a bounce in the polls for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.
Democrats made clear at their convention in Chicago that reproductive rights were a cornerstone of their appeal to voters in November’s election after conservative judges on the US Supreme Court, including three appointed by Trump, overturned the federal right of access.
Vance, 40, told NBC’s Meet The Press that Trump, who has spoken of his pride in enabling the abortion ruling, “wants to end this culture war over this particular topic”.
“If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio,” Vance said.
“Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a non-stop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down – issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster.”
Abortion is banned in 14 of the country’s 50 states, with some exceptions to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest, with bans at various early stages of pregnancy up to 18 weeks in eight more states.
Pressed on whether Trump would veto a bill for a federal abortion ban across America, Vance said: “If you’re not supporting it as the president of the US, you fundamentally have to veto it.”
Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, told NBC: “American women are not stupid and we are not going to trust the future of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country.”
The Harris campaign said it had raised dollars 540 million in donations following President Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, a huge sum that dwarfed Trump’s fundraising efforts in July of dollars 138.7 million.
Trump will try to get back on the front foot with speeches in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week while Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, will kick off their own tour in Georgia on Wednesday.
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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)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, August 26, 2024
To get ahead of the curve, the Fed should follow the quantity theory of money
I would have thought that it was bleeding obvious that monetary expansion would be followed by price inflation but I accept that they are talking below about the short to medium term whereas the effects of monetary expansion on prices certainly can take some time to emerge
The tide has suddenly turned on the economics consensus among everyone from Keynesian professors to Wall Street commentators. Their expectations for a soft landing have fallen to earth.
The immediate trigger for the shift and the selloff in equity markets was a run of adverse data last week. It began on Wednesday, with higher claims for unemployment insurance, followed on Thursday by weak purchasing-manager indexes for manufacturing and services. Then on Friday came disappointing nonfarm payroll data and a higher than expected unemployment figure.
To explain why the consensus changed so fast, the economic chattering classes and press have latched onto the Sahm rule. That tool, created by economist Claudia Sahm, correlates an increase in unemployment with the onset of recessions. According to Ms. Sahm’s research, if the unemployment rate climbs by half a percentage point or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months, we will be in the early months of a recession.
This index has identified all recessions since 1953, but Ms. Sahm rightly emphasizes that the rule is only an empirical regularity, not a theory. Since January the unemployment rate has risen from 3.7% to 4.3%, fulfilling the Sahm criterion of a 0.5-point rise. The 3.7% low qualified, as it represents a low that has occurred within the past 12 months. This suggests the economy may already be in a recession.
The Federal Reserve was having none of it last week. On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee held the federal-funds rate steady at 5.25% to 5.5%. Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are data dependent. Until the data give them confidence that inflation will stay low, or until their full employment objective is threatened, they won’t cut rates. Since we know that changes in monetary policy act with a long lag in affecting inflation or unemployment, a data-dependent Fed will always be behind the curve.
To get ahead of it, the central bank should be basing its decisions on the quantity theory of money, a model that allows for reliable predictions about the course of the economy and inflation over the coming two years. The only people who successfully predicted inflation almost two years ahead of its peak—both in terms of timing and magnitude—were monetary economists.
For more than a year, monetarists have been warning that the economy would likely enter recession this year. That is because the Fed has over-constricted money growth between 2022 and 2024. The stock of money is now lower than it was in July 2022. Since the Fed was established in 1913, such contractions have only occurred on four occasions: in 1920-22, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49. The second episode resulted in the Great Depression, and recessions followed the other three.
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Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term
David Pearl
As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.
Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.
A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.
Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).
While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.
Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.
Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.
And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.
How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.
While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.
In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.
The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)
Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.
Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.
Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.
While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.
If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.
This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.
It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.
But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/
*******************************************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)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, August 25, 2024
Kamala Harris’s political strategy: vibes in a vacuum
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention continued the convention’s vibe. It focused mainly on the usual autobiographical sentimentality. My mother… our neighbourhood… and all the heart tuggung emotion of every American political speech. Whose upbringing is not worthy of a sentimental treatment? It’ a good thing that Australia doesn’t have that stylistic obsession.
There were almost no specifics in the Harris speech, but it certainly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reached the right register of love of country and high aspiration.
It wallowed in abstract nouns and mainly got specific when it denounced Donald Trump.
Nonetheless Harris’s speech had a few unexpected wrinkles. First of all, like the whole convention, it was overtly patriotic.
The Republicans have effectively pushed Democrats into a much more explicit embrace of America, its history and ideals, a more muted critique of the ills of American history and society.
There were American flags everywhere. The crowd broke into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”.
That’s cute and quite smart by Democrats, stealing a characteristically Republican chant.
Also, she showcased the new Democrat way of dealing with Trump, to present him in part as a bit of a joke.
“Donald Trump is in many ways an unserious man,” Harris said.
“But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”
That’s a cleverer combination than Democrats have had in the past. The whole convention focused a lot on the alleged dangers of Trump, but in a less hysterical tone.
Indeed, one of the features of the convention was a series of anti-Trump Republican speakers. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinziger was especially effective.
The best part of Harris’s speech were a few strong paragraphs on foreign policy. Unexpectedly perhaps, she strongly backed Israel and its right to defend itself but also reasonably labelled what’s happened in Gaza as devastating.
She also said she’d always provide for a powerful US military, “the strongest and most lethal force in the world”, which runs against her quite recent advocacy for cutting defence spending.
She pledged support for Ukraine and criticised Trump for endangering NATO. That was orthodox presidential stuff but she’s never done it before.
Harris hardly mentioned Biden and tried to recapture some of the campaign magic of Barack Obama.
She still offered almost nothing specific on the US economy.
It was still almost entirely about the vibe. A few sentences of substance were welcome but all the more stark because they were so lonely.
Harris thinks she’s going to become president in November. The candidate who couldn’t win a single vote when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, who five minutes ago had a lower approval rating than the departing Joe Biden, whose manifest lack of experience and competence was one reason Biden selected her as an unthreatening deputy, thinks she will sweep the board and, to mix the metaphors, surf into the White House on a wave of joy and love and happiness and IVF and abortion.
At least, that’s the message from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It was a brilliantly produced and nearly flawlessly executed affair, a Hollywood winner, all the more effective because it shifted towards the new fashions in the genre.
All the stars performed. Barack Obama, certainly the most effective political speaker of his generation, and Michelle Obama, licensed to be the angry Democrat. Bill Clinton, fading a little but still with lots of magic. Hillary Clinton, not quite right as ever. And the newly discovered governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, presenting as the folksy goodie nice guy dad, football coach, high school teacher, aw shucks, just the sweetest guy in the room. Biden, like a garrulous grandpa, on the first night talking and talking and talking endlessly, endlessly, endlessly with his old anecdotes and political war stories, until way after midnight, way after not only his bedtime but everybody else’s as well, then sent away from the party, never to be seen again.
And the biggest star of all – Oprah Winfrey! She’s still got it. She was Barack Obama’s most important endorsement in 2008. Some studies say she got him a million votes. She didn’t campaign for Hillary, and look what happened. But now she’s back in the ring for Kamala. “Choose common sense over nonsense,” Winfrey says.
And Kamala herself, intermittently present, still yet to give an unscripted interview since Biden, more than a month ago, announced he would not run again, the most perfectly curated candidate since Robert Redford in The Candidate, offering the most inviting blank canvas for every hope to be written on since Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Bill Clinton suggested Harris, who worked in a fast food restaurant as a youngster, would eclipse his record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s. Surely this other record, the first new frontrunner candidate for the presidency to go longer than a month after announcing her candidacy without giving a single unscripted interview, is the more significant record.
Former President Bill Clinton devoted a great portion of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to mocking Donald Trump, from his self obsession, his age, even his obsession with Hannibal Lecter.
The Democratic National Convention, while mostly civil in tone and joyous in the way the laughter track on an old 1960s sitcom is joyous, also demonstrated the new hollowness, the intellectual bankruptcy, the sheer echoing emptiness of modern presidential politics, which has become a kind of universal celebrity dancing-with-the-stars performance. There was almost no mention of policy of any kind, barely a line about foreign policy, certainly nothing so otiose as defence policy, until a couple of sentences in Harris’s own convention speech. Similarly, there was nothing about cyber security, budget deficits or any of that boring old yesterday’s stuff, the looking at the past kind of old politics.
Instead, everything was about the vibe, a perfectly conceived series of empty, and often quite dishonest, emotional high points.
There was less Hollywood than in previous Democrat conventions. The politicians still wanted a bit of entertainment glamour, but mostly they mined their own backstories for ersatz glamour. Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, an impressive performer in anyone’s books, nonetheless said absolutely nothing about transport and spoke instead almost exclusively about his gay marriage.
The first night was all about feminist women celebrating the wonderful identity politics of Harris’s candidacy. To be clear, any background can furnish a good presidential candidate. Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice would have been superb Republican candidates. But do you really vote for someone because of their ethnicity or sex?
Michelle Obama put the biggest stress on black identity politics.
“For years,” she said, “Donald Trump did everything he could to make people fear us. Who is going to tell him the job he is seeking might be one of those black jobs?”
Her reference was to Trump saying that illegal immigrants were taking black and Hispanic jobs. This was a clumsy, even ugly, formulation by Trump, for sure. But his meaning was harmless. Illegal immigrants were taking jobs that African-Americans and Hispanics traditionally occupied in very large numbers. But Michelle Obama labelling the presidency “a black job”, is that really an example of “when they go low, we go high”?
Similarly, there was the first night’s highlight, Hillary Clinton – we put some cracks in that glass ceiling but on the other side of those cracks is Kamala Harris being inaugurated as president!
The Democrats dialled back identity politics a bit, but it’s still central to their pitch.
As well as dialling down identity politics and Hollywood, the Democrats, in a measured and limited way, dialled up God and patriotism.
Everybody seemed to finish their speech with God bless America, which for some years had gone right out of fashion among Democrats. Lots of folks talked about the help of God and going to church. There were several one-line denunciations of anti-Semitism, and only a few of them were accompanied by the formerly obligatory simultaneous denunciation of Islamophobia.
One or two speakers said they wanted the war in Gaza to end as soon as possible, an idea so wonderfully generic that anybody from any party in America could sign up to it.
You could just about see the team of Democrat script writers calibrating everything. There was even just the right amount of anti-Israel demonstrators outside the convention. The presence of left-wing demonstrators helps reassure middle America that the Democrats are not themselves left-wing extremists, but the fact the number of demonstrators is not too big means they won’t generate any real energy against the Democratic ticket on the left.
This was nothing like 1968, when the US commitment to the Vietnam war ripped Democrats apart and there were passionate debates on the convention floor. Nothing happens now at conventions that is not perfectly scripted. As a result conventions are much less meaningful as democratic exercises. The political parties like it like that. No political professional wants an outbreak of real democracy. The DNC was every bit as contrived and artificial as the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier. Both parties create a kind of fantasy America in which the other side is a mortal threat to democracy and only their party can come to the rescue.
Image is everything. Memes are bankable currency. Democrat congressional leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a speech that seemed staccato and a bit demented until you realised it was a rap performance designed to go viral, or at least to be a little contagious.
Speaker after speaker labelled Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and Republicans generally as “weird”, but this too was carefully calibrated. Mostly each speaker, even the big beast former presidents Obama and Clinton, used the word only once, lest the mere repetition of the word weird should start to look weird itself.
Of course, “weird” is a pretty mild insult. Trump himself has been so brutishly and coarsely insulting, indeed childishly insulting, about anyone he doesn’t like at any given moment, and has himself so often said things that are completely untrue, that he has no claims to sympathy over having his honour or reputation trashed.
Nonetheless, it’s important to see when the Democrats are telling the truth, and when they’re telling lies. The Democrat convention trafficked in untruth at three levels.
First, it offered no policies, while claiming to be providing a choice between good government and weirdness. But American politics is now entirely dominated by the dynamics of celebrity. Policy is the last thing anyone talks about.
Second, it pretended the Biden-Harris record simply didn’t exist, or that Harris had no part in its many manifold failures.
Before the convention, Harris outlined some bare scraps of an economic policy. Inflation was too high, she proclaimed, and she would tackle it. Inflation was high, in her view, because of corporate greed and “price gouging”.
In fact, inflation has risen because of the massive increase in government spending that Biden, with Harris as his Vice-President, has driven. Not only that, prices paid by producers have risen as quickly as prices paid by consumers, which means price gouging is the least of all the problems.
The few concrete policies Harris has proposed, such as government-imposed price caps and government-imposed rent increase caps, would be disastrous and have support from virtually no serious economist. Similarly, Harris has said she’ll tackle illegal immigration. Yet the crisis on the Mexican border was entirely created by Biden and Harris.
Third, and perhaps most seriously, the Democrat convention consistently lied about Trump and the Republicans. I don’t mean here shades of grey or exaggerations but just plain outright lies. Almost every third speech, it seemed, mentioned the threat of Republicans not only to absolute legal abortion from conception to birth but also to IVF fertility treatments.
I found this intriguing because I wasn’t aware of any Republican proposal to restrict IVF. It turns out there is no such proposal. Some anti-abortion activists are opposed to IVF because it involves creating and disposing of embryos. No Republican politician is remotely opposed to IVF, certainly not Trump or Vance. There was a court case in Alabama that threw some doubt on IVF’s legality and the state Republicans immediately rushed to make sure it remained legal. Trump and Vance support it, as do more or less all Republicans.
The lie that Republicans plan to ban IVF is so brazen that when you hear it consistently over several days your first reaction is to assume there must be some serious proposal among Republicans to at least restrict IVF. In fact there is none.
Senate Democrats introduced a declaratory bill mandating a national right to IVF, and a similar bill on contraception. Republicans all said they supported IVF but leave the matter to the states, none of which inhibits IVF. So this pure stunt is then used as a justification for a wholly fraudulent claim that Republicans actively plan to outlaw IVF. No wonder so many Americans hate politics.
More here:
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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)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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