At a time of raging inflation-driven consumer costs and a tanking stock market that shrinks 401(k) plans under Biden-Harris economic policies, will voters really opt for more of the same or likely even worse?
Lessons From Recent Experience
Consider that year-over-year seasonally adjusted consumer price index (CPI) ratings averaged 5.7% under Biden, compared with 1.97% under Trump.
According to data published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), average weekly gasoline costs were $2.57 per gallon under Trump; $3.48 per gallon under Biden.
The cost of a 30-year home mortgage rate under Trump was 2.65%, compared with 7.57% as of June under Biden — nearly three times higher.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor indicates that as of April, purchasers earning a median $81,144 income purchasing a median-priced $376,000 home with a lower 30-year mortgage rate of 7% would still translate to $2,250 in monthly principal and interest payments.
This amounts to roughly 43% of gross household income, whereby housing is considered affordable only when the cost doesn't exceed 30%.
A July Economist/YouGov Survey of registered voters showed that 72% rated the Biden-Harris economy as fair/poor.
The Fed's Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households report for 2023, which looks at American's economic health across a variety of areas, including employment, income, banking and credit, housing, retirement planning, student loans, and child care, found that inflation made the financial lives "worse" for 65% of U.S. households.
The Democrat Socialist Agenda
So is this inflationary pain just a temporary trend, and if not, would a President Kamala Harris and similarly uber-liberal Vice President Tim Walz administration change spending and regulatory policies responsible for causing it?
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, has described Walz as "philosophically and politically" aligned with Harris, "a sort of Bernie Sanders in hunting gear," essentially "the same product, just in different wrappers."
That's saying a lot since as U.S. senator from 2017 to 2021, Kamala had a more leftist voting record than even socialist Sanders did.
Recall that Kamala was the first senator to co-sponsor a bill by Sen. Sanders, the Medicare for All Act of 2017, which, if enacted, would have abolished private health insurance for all age groups (including Medicare beneficiaries) and replaced it with a government-run single-payer system to benefit "every individual who is a resident of the United States," including undocumented immigrants.
Mercatus estimated that the legislation would have cost a $32 trillion increase in federal spending above then-projected government expenditures from 2022 to 2031.
As a former senator from overwhelmingly liberal California, Kamala sponsored a bill to create a $6,000 guaranteed income for families making up to $100,000, and co-sponsored legislation with Bernie Sanders that would pay tuition at four-year public colleges for students from families making up to $125,000 which would cost taxpayers an estimated $700 billion over a decade and encourage colleges to increase tuition.
Vice President Harris voted to break the tie on the $1.85 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, largely a COVID-19 relief bill that unleashed massive government spending and debt.
Much of that aid has resulted in alleged fraud, which has helped to further fuel inflation.
Inflationary Green New Delusions
Rising oil and gas prices have major inflationary impacts along with imposing substantial personal and household gas pump pain.
Former Sen. Harris of California was an original Senate co-sponsor of the "Green New Deal" wind and solar plan blowout, which she has since said she'd be in favor of repealing the filibuster to restore.
As Democratic presidential candidate in 2019, then-Sen. Harris supported a ban on hydraulic fracturing and spending trillions of dollars on a Green New Deal to bring greenhouse gas emissions to net zero within a decade, which would cost tens of thousands of jobs and increase the frequency of power outages in her own state.
Just before dropping out of her first presidential campaign bid to join President Joe Biden's ticket, Kamala told a CNN town hall, "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking" — even on private property, supporting a ban on any new oil and gas infrastructure from being built.
She also favors a Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency mandate requiring that 50% of all new-car sales are electric by 2030 despite nearly half of all current electric vehicle owners indicating plans to switch back to petroleum vehicles at a time when manufacturers of those vehicles are losing money on each one produced.
Although the administration's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations across the U.S., as of April, only eight had been built from that public money.
Let's hope a majority of voters take heed of these painful "big government knows best" lessons for dummies when casting November ballots that will determine our nation's economic survival.
A Harris-Walz redux of disastrous Biden-Harris crash-and-burn policies can't be allowed to leave our American economy buried under smoldering ashes of worthless money.
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.
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