Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris is running on a vapid campaign slogan to “turn the page” and embrace her undefined “opportunity economy” plan to rescue a nation from a raging wave of inflation that is sinking household and business budgets while drowning future generations in hopeless debt.
The pitch repeatedly echoed by speakers during the Democratic National Convention purported that the U.S. economy was “reeling” according to former President Barack Obama, or as asserted by Kamala during her recent ABC debate, “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”
President Joe Biden had argued similarly in his debate, “Look at what ... Trump left me.” An economy “in free fall.”
Not mentioned was the fact that the economy had already emerged from a devastating pandemic-induced recession and had begun to recover by that time.
In February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the unemployment level under Trump stood at 3.5%, matching its lowest level in more than 50 years. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product then increased at a solid annualized clip of 2.1% over the final three months of 2019.
Ensuing pandemic shutdowns across much of the U.S. plunged the economy into a recession, causing the unemployment rate skyrocketed to almost 15%, its worst performance in more than three decades.
In March 2020, Trump signed a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package into law, including direct payments of $1,200 and expanded unemployment insurance, then in December enacted a second $900 billion round of government support.
The 14.7% April 2020 unemployment rate dropped 10% by year’s end to 6.7% as much of the economy reopened and business activity returned to something resembling normal.
Whereas that rate was still nearly double pre-pandemic levels, it was well below the peak reached right after the outbreak with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P ending at record highs.
By the time Trump left office, the stock market, so crucial to workers’ 401(k)s, was stronger than before COVID, and by the first quarter of 2021, the nation’s gross domestic product was as well.
Credit, or not, Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine development program for helping out before Joe and Kamala entered the White House, the recession lasted only two months into the spring of 2020, the shortest U.S. recession ever recorded by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Maybe we might cut him some slack for boasting a bit during the Republican National Convention that "Nobody's ever seen an economy [like ours] pre-COVID, and then we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to COVID."
By the time President Biden signed his “American Rescue Plan” in March 2021, unemployment had already dropped to 6.1%, compared with more than 8% that had occurred throughout nearly all of Obama’s pre-COVID term.
Nevertheless, there was no audible Democrat outcry regarding the high unemployment rate which didn’t drop to 6.1% until Obama had been in office 5 years when he and Joe Biden ran for reelection in 2012.
The Biden-Harris “rescue plan” which passed the Senate with V.P Kamala’s tie-breaking vote and was enacted when recovery was already well under way, combined with state benefits which together paid many recipients more than they would have earned by returning to pre-COVID jobs, had enormous inflationary consequences.
To compete with the plan’s largess, businesses were forced to raise pay — and then prices. This led to the Fed’s interest rate increases, leading in turn to slowing job growth.
This profligate Biden-Harris spending exacerbated inflationary consequences of Kamala’s tie breaking vote to pass the “Cares Act” a year earlier which provided an additional $600 on top of the weekly maximum unemployment benefit for four months.
Add to this Kamala’s tie-breaking vote on the Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act budget boondoggle that included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public EV charging stations across the U.S., which, as of April, only eight had been built.
Then there’s that notoriously mis-named $739 billion spending bill called the “Inflation Reduction Act” where again, V.P. Harris cast the Senate tie-breaking vote in August 2022.
Since then, according to estimates assembled by Americans for Tax Reform, the cost of new mortgages has climbed 36% in those two years, the cost of baby food has shot up by 13%, frozen vegetables have increased by 14% along with major increases in costs of butter, bread, flour, breakfast cereal and transportation.
Now dare to imagine future economic consequences if a President Kamala Harris succeeds in achieving her campaign plan to tax unrealized capital gains which exist only on paper.
While initially applying only to high-net-worth individuals and corporations, be certain that such a precedent would inevitably force asset liquidations consequences for increasingly less wealthy investors and pensioners to cover theoretical and temporary gains.
And what about that “Bidenomics” that Kamala lavishly praised a year ago as “working” but now — like the open U.S. southern border invasion — wants you to believe she had little or nothing to do with?
No, don’t trust your lyin’ eyes and bleeding credit card deficits.
We’re now supposed to turn the page on all that, forget that Kamala’s failed record is printed all over that page she wants us to turn, and expect a repeat of another chapter of the same socialist big spending taxpayer handout policies will tell a happier story.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.