Copy of AFF Sentinel V21 #45-Election Eve 2024
- Steve Dittmer
- Jul 22
- 5 min read
Another Most-Important-Election in Your Life -- Really!
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 11/04/24
We assume all of you have already voted or will Tuesday. Have you made sure any relatives who need a ride or a push have been accounted for? Have you made sure if you have any employees that you have given them the time or the ride they need? Are there some seniors you know or some you don't know who need a ride? Turnout is something we cannot let up on.
And importantly, make sure everyone votes down ballot, too. If the president has no majorities to work with and set the agenda in Congress, the key measures we need to restore the democratic REPUBLIC cannot be enacted.
Right off the bat, we need to correct something. Last time, we said we thought Trump and Lighthizer would not want to revisit the hard fought USMCA trade agreement.
Well, the very next day we saw a piece that said Canada, Mexico and the U.S. all wanted to do some work on USMCA. Lots of it was working and had functioned well but they wanted to make some changes.
So much for predicting international diplomacy.
A couple columns ago we wrote about the letter from 26 Nobel-Prize-Winning economists and the effects of political ideology on supposedly data-informed economists. There seems to be a definite division of economic experts according to leftist or conservative, free market philosophies.
We guess we shouldn’t regard the intrusion of politics on economics as something new, as Keynesian economic theory has been used to justify government control and spending in the economy off and on for 80 years.
It’s taken different forms in recent years but the preference of central control of the economy by nations and world powers certainly influences some economic thought.
Even so, given the economic lessons of the 21st century, we were a bit taken aback by a survey of economists by the Wall Street Journal wherein the majority of them thought Donald Trump would be responsible for more inflation, higher interest rates and bigger deficits than Kamala Harris’ “proposed policies” (“Economists See Higher Inflation with Trump,” 10/14/24).
We put “proposed policies” in quotes as she has famously refused to discuss mechanical details of any policies. Harris has been long on generalities, good at describing people’s pain but bereft of solutions. We loved one pundit’s quips that if Harris came back as an animal, she would be a “duckbilled platitude.”
The majority of economists, therefore, do not believe in supply-side economics, contrary to actual results demonstrated by Calvin Coolidge, JFK, Ronald Reagan and Trump 1. The policy details from the Democratic platform written by the party for Biden and purloined by Harris, calls for not only higher tax rates, more regulation and more spending, it even invents taxes no one has dared propose before, like taxing unrealized capital gains.
Are we alone in regarding these idea as contrary and crazy, and those economists seriously off the mark?
S.T. Karnick is with the Heartland Institute, was with the Hudson Institute prior -- both free market outfits -- and has written for many other publications. He recently wrote a piece entitled “Here’s Where Anti-Trump Economists Go Wrong,” for the Western Journal, (10/29/24).
That column title alone would indicate a belief that there are partisan divides among economists.
“Harris has proposed less in tax cuts than Trump, which the economists see as a good thing and apparently they have discounted all of Harris’ spending promises as of little consequence…” Karnick said [emphasis ours].
Whether from observation the last eight years or academic education, how could any self-respecting economist consider the Biden/Harris and Congressional left’s spending as unconnected to inflation?
As for tax rates and government receipts, these economists certainly don’t understand the dynamics of human response to incentives or disincentives.
They must have never run a business. Any business owner is familiar with the basic quandary: how much or how little can I raise prices without decreasing sales, losing customers and losing profit?
Yet these economists seem to think they can raise tax rates in big chunks and not decrease government revenues and hammer growth. And evidently, the political left listens to these guys instead of free market economists or any guy or gal who’s run a business. We already showed you the effects on government revenues from the 2017 tax cuts (Vol 21#39) and regulation rollbacks, what Trump wants to do more of and the opposite moves the Democrats are proposing. Ronald Reagan and Art Laffer built their reputations on this principle: when you tax something, you get less of it.
As for inflation, Trump handed over an economy with an inflation rate of 1.4 percent, which then peaked at 9 percent under Biden/Harris. That was the overall CPI. The prices of necessities for taxpayers were 20 percent higher. Government revenue, after the 2017 tax cuts, hit an all-time high of $4.9 trillion in 2022, before Biden’s inflation-ridden, regulation-plagued economy took it down to $4.4 trillion in 2023 -- up from $3.32 trillion in 2017. The deficit was twice as high under Biden/Harris at $1.6 trillion, Karnick noted.
One doesn’t need a Ph.D. in economics to figure out which administration you’d rather live under from 2024 on. Or wish you could re-wind the tape back to 2020.
Karnick also notes the federal spending spree. Biden/Harris and their Congressional accomplices have pushed spending nearly $2 trillion above Trump’s January 2017-2020 trend line, with the trend line still rising steeply. In contrast, real per capita income in the last four years has dropped far below that trend line, with each American having $3,500 less than the Trump trend line (each person, not household). By the end of Trump’s term in 2020, real median income was 8.2 percent higher, even with pandemic shutdowns (Wall Street Journal, Census Bureau), Karnick noted.
He also noted that all the federal spending, all the inflation and all the higher prices we’re dealing with now and forward, would never have happened if were not for Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking votes on the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and the February 2021 budget resolution.
It is exceedingly puzzling that dozens of supposedly intelligent economists could not analyze the data better than to call Harris the better pick for our economy.
By comparison with the pedigreed economists the Journal surveyed, the average cowboy really is as smart as a treeful of owls.
Let’s hope the average voter is just as smart.
Our address: Agribusiness Freedom Foundation, P.O. Box 88179, Colorado Springs, CO. 80908.
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