Biden's and Harris's self-vaunted economy starts to crater
The jobs numbers are out. The NASDAQ is tanking. And just like that, Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's claims to have "saved" the economy are down in the rising rubble of a fresh-made economic crater.
According to the New York Times:
Stocks skidded on Friday, capping off a turbulent week for Wall Street, as investors were jolted by data showing that hiring slowed and unemployment rose in July.
The spiking uncertainty about the economic outlook, and the question of whether the Federal Reserve has been too slow to cut interest rates, was evident across financial markets.
Which is ugly stuff for the American people as it puts paid to the Biden-Harris camp's claim to have "rescued" the U.S. economy.
No, they didn't rescue it.
They took the COVID lockdown disaster, pumped a few trillion into the economy for a slew of government spending programs, many brimming with corruption, and now are seeing the comedown, the cratering, the acceleration of a major economic downturn that won't be fixed based on anything they ever do. It will stay a nightmare and citizens can only hope it won't get worse.
But it will get worse.
Inflation after all, isn't over. As Beege Welborn noted in his (correction: her) excellent piece on HotAir, that inflation costs the average American family an extra $13,000 a year, money forcibly spent for nothing.
Meanwhile, the federal government gets its own version of inflation, with interest payments on the national debt now topping defense spending, which is Biden's and Harris's real "historic first."
That money spent, too, is money for nothing. It could have been spent on useful things if there were enough economy to spend such things on, but government's expansion has crowded out the private sector, making less for it to be used on. What happens when there's too much money floating around in the system? That's right, it's inflation, same thing as torments the private sector except that it also drives that inflation the consumers have to "pay for."
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rant a lot about tax cuts and whether they are "paid for," ignoring that tax revenues go up, not down, when there are tax cuts for voters. But neither Biden nor Harris talk about the inflation they create through all their government spending being "paid for" whether consumers like it or not.
That government largesse courses through the economy and then we start to see the private sector shrivel. One such indicator as Welborn notes, is the declining purchasing managers index which tells us what manufacturers are planning to manufacture. Turns out it's less. We also see falling consumer and business confidence, retail price rises, lower productivity, culminating at the end in falling employment, the final indicator of an economy going south.
Unemployment is at 4.3% now and jobs created are falling. Nobody creates jobs without a reasonable expectation of economic growth to justify them. That's where we are now, at the jobs collapse.
That's the wages of vast government spending with no economy to absorb the dollars printed to pay for them.
Now it's going to get bad. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman taught. Joe Biden has mocked Friedman in the past with the claim that he's "not in charge any more." Kamala Harris is vowing a massive $2 trillion spending program for "childcare," a pork program so bad even the Democrats couldn't get it through Congress back when Biden and Harris were passing big spending bills. If she gets her way through the presidency, that will stoke the inflation monster even more.
But while Biden mocks and Harris has never heard of Friedman or Economics 101, Friedman's truths are still in charge, as they always are.
Now it's time to pay the piper. This is what President Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance must hammer the Biden-Harris clown show with everything they've got, knowing that consumers are feeling this and knowing exactly what it takes to stop this.
They need to hit hard, because the deluge is on us.
Image: United States Geological Survey, via Picryl // public domain