1,307 Days

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

One thousand, three hundred and seven. That’s how many days Kamala Harris has been Vice President of the United States, effective this Monday.

Now let’s do a thought experiment. Put aside the fact that Harris was arbitrarily made the Democratic nominee without ever receiving a delegate or winning a primary.

And put aside the fact that, after usurping power via an in-party coup, she has continued as its candidate for nearly a month without giving an unscripted press conference or taking questions.

Let’s focus on the fact that this candidate, who has been part and parcel of the well-being of the state of the nation for the better part of four years, is not only completely blind to the damage her current administration’s policies have caused but is publicly calling them out. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she’s proposing policy solutions that are going to make the problems created by her policies worse.

Last week, taking a break from reading the same thing from a teleprompter every day, somebody on Harris’s strategy team thought it would be a good idea to begin trashing the economy of the country over the last three years.

The problems are well known: the country has been suffering from ridiculous inflation, and prices are through the roof, placing a burden on many low- and middle-class families.

Chart: Zero Hedge

“We all know that prices went up during the pandemic when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high,” she said on Friday. “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50%.”

But the alarm is coming from inside the house.

“Under the Biden-Harris administration, grocery prices have shot up 21%, part of an inflation surge that has raised overall costs by about 19% and soured many Americans on the economy, even as unemployment fell to historic lows. Wages have also risen sharply since the pandemic, and have outpaced prices for more than a year. Still, surveys find Americans continue to struggle with higher costs,” ABC wrote last week.

The same report makes it clear that grocery prices are now only rising in-line with pre-pandemic rates of change: “Grocery prices are still painfully high compared to four years ago, but they increased just 1.1% in July compared with a year earlier, according to the most recent inflation report. That is in line with pre-pandemic increases.”

In other words, the price gouging boogeyman doesn’t seem to exist.

The stunning thing is Kamala Harris is now campaigning on being able to fix these problems when her administration oversaw them to begin with. I mean, I knew a lot of the Democratic Party base was essentially the voting equivalent of trained circus seals and that they are going to vote for whatever candidate the state stuffs down their throat as the solution to racism and climate change anyway, but this is far more egregious.

When CNN is running headlines like this and you’re a Democrat, you know your policy has to really be horrific:

Same with The Washington Post running opinion columns like this one:

Think of the hubris necessary to run on a platform of fixing the policies of the last administration when you are the last administration.

Source: WaPo

Now, let’s take that destructive idiocy and square it: the proposed “solutions” Harris is coming up with are all extraordinarily inflationary. Harris has proposed cancelling medical debt, a $6,000 child tax credit for families within a newborn child, $25,000 in downpayment assistance for 400,000 first-generation home buyers and a $10,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers.

In other words: “Hubba, hubba, hubba, money, money, money. Who do you trust?”

In the world of unicorns and rainbows, this all sounds great. But back here in reality, where people know there are always consequences to actions, the country simply doesn’t have the money to pay for this crap. That means that the money for these proposals is going to have to be printed, and, as most of us know, expanding the money supply is the literal definition of inflation.

Putting aside the moral hazard that these policies would create—namely, that giving everybody a $25,000 credit to buy a house guarantees the price of housing rises by $25,000 per house because the seller now knows that you’re $25,000 richer—the result is going to be more inflation.

And at the same time Harris proposes slamming the inflation accelerator down to the floor, she’s turning around and blaming the problem that the government is creating—inflation—on grocery stores and “price gouging.”

As a result, she has proposed price controls on food, a policy you would be more likely to see in North Korea or communist Russia than in Los Angeles and New York. Price controls do nothing to solve the problem: they only would lead to food shortages, black markets, and grocery stores so burdened by regulation that would be forced to go out of business if they can’t raise their prices.

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Even a Mensa candidate like Harris should understand that grocery stores have some of the lowest margins of any business. They have hiked prices on items because the cost of producing those items has risen. Just because Harris doesn’t like the end result of shrinkflation and higher prices doesn’t make the idea of micromanaging a state-planned economy any more of a solution than it has been all the times it has failed throughout history.

Harris has called her plan an “economic opportunity plan”, but the only thing that creates opportunity, lowers prices, and gives consumers more choice and a better bargain is free-market capitalism. Subsidizing houses with taxpayer money, worsening the problem that the welfare state has created by incentivizing having children, using taxpayer money and purchasing power to socialize other people’s fiscal irresponsibility and trying to exercise government control over the cost of rice and beans is the opposite of having a vibrant free-market economy that offers people opportunity.

Instead, it is literally throwing a wet blanket of communism over what’s left of our country’s economy and implementing arguably the worst possible “solutions” to fix the problem of inflation that the country is grappling with. If these harebrained ideas take hold, the country will suffer from significantly more inflation than it has dealt with over the last three years. The result would make the stagflation that we are dealing with now a mainstay for many years to come and would also disincentivize the rest of the world from holding U.S. dollars and U.S. treasuries.

And so there you have it: the party that constantly fearmongers and scares its base into thinking that not voting for them will result in authoritarian fascism is pushing an unelected candidate, selected by a handful of the country’s elites, eager to usher in an openly communist agenda that is all but guaranteed to destroy the fabric of our country.

You can’t make this sh*t up.

Now read:

• George Gammon Explains The Yen Carry Trade Chaos
• Matt Taibbi: Kamala, Trump & The Death Of Objective Truth
• Modern Chickenshit Monetary Theory

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