If the Trump campaign succeeds in focusing voters’ attention on the economy, he could win in a landslide.
There should be no question in anyone’s mind that the economy plays a major role in voters’ decision on who to elect to public office. We know this intuitively, but we also have historical proof.
In 1980, Reagan used Carter’s faltering economy as a major tool to win the election. In 1992, Clinton used a similar strategy to defeat Bush. Given the current state of the U. S. economy in 2024, Trump is in an excellent position to defeat the Biden/Harris effort to be reelected by pointing out that Harris would be giving us more of the horrible policies they have given us in the last three and a half years.
There are many economic factors that affect people’s lives, but none is more significant than inflation. Inflation hurts in a disproportionate manner fixed income citizens and those in the lower economic brackets. These are the people that Democrats claim to be the champions of. There is a major political problem for an administration when previously-prosperous families find themselves unable to make ends meet because of irresponsible behavior by the leaders of that administration.
People do not need a mathematical formula to understand that their income is no longer enough to purchase necessities, but the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has created a tool to do just that.
That tool may be accessed at https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Using that tool, we calculated the inflation rate during Trump’s administration and compared it to that of the Biden/Harris administration. Here are the results.
- In December, 2020 it took $107.26 to buy what $100.00 would have bought in January, 2017, for a cumulative Trump-era inflation rate of 7.26% (A very acceptable Less than 2% per year).
- In July, 2024 it took $120.25 to buy what $100.00 would have bought in January, 2021, for a cumulative Biden/Harris-era inflation rate of 20.25% (An unacceptable 6% per year, triple that of Trump’s)
On Friday, August 17, Tamala Harris gave us a peak at what she plans to do to fix the mess that she and Biden created. It entails more of the same failed policies that caused the problem in the first place. Here are some examples:
FOOD AND GROCERY PRICES: Harris is adopting the worst page from Richard Nixon’s 1970’s economic plan. She wants to impose national price controls on food and groceries. She wants to back it up with a Marxist-style federal ban on food and groceries price gouging. The reality is that profit margins in this industry are very low, and price gouging is quite rare. Soring food prices are the result of the overall inflation caused by ill-advised Biden/Harris policies and regulations.
Price controls were a bad idea when implemented by Nixon and are still a terrible idea if implemented by Harris.
HOUSING COSTS: Harris wants to correct the high cost of housing by causing the opposite to happen, namely fueling demand, and increasing government spending. Both measures are textbook examples of inflationary pressures.
The proposed $25,000 down payment assistance for first-time home buyers may increase the number of buyers who can afford to buy, but the higher price created by higher demand will wipe out any assistance and make it less affordable to buy homes not only for first-time buyers, but for everyone.
RENT CONTROLS: She wants legislation that would prevent rental home investors from colluding with each other to raise rental prices. Rent controls, like all controls, have a negative effect. In this case, it would actually reduce the number of units available, making a bad situation worse. Rent controls have failed every time they have been tried.
CHILD TAX CREDIT: Tax reductions are generally a very good thing, but only when applied universally. That is not the case with Harris’ proposals. One of the proposed credits will be a $6,000 credit for newborns. People without children or those whose children are not newborn would not be eligible. The other break is a $3,600 per child for middle and lower-class families. A much better use of tax reductions would be an extension of the 2017 universal tax cuts introduced by Trump in 2017, which benefit everyone, not just a few. Those universal tax cuts are set to expire December 31, 2025. Allowing those tax cuts to expire will amount to a huge tax increase for everyone. This could likely eclipse any benefit that the tax credits proposed by Harris could generate.
After the Democrat convention, and as the presidential campaigns heat up, we will likely get more of the missing details in the Harris proposals. However, given her history, her plan will likely lean heavily on communistic tax-and-spend schemes that, if implemented, will be detrimental to our economy.
