CHICAGO — Although the barbarians outside the gates of the Democratic National Convention believe themselves to be opposed to Kamala Harris's milquetoast support for our democratic ally Israel , even the angriest protesters admitted they like what the vice president has to say about the economy.
"We would love price controls that actually work," one particularly hysterical demonstrator from Workers Strike Back said as he lambasted my suggestion that the Democratic presidential nominee would characterize herself as pro-labor. "The price controls that work are a working class that's organized in powerful unions, that can win powerful games for working-class people, and that's not the politics of your newspaper, is it?"
It's less that the politics of the Washington Examiner want the working class to lose and more that central planning seldom results in the stated intentions of collectivists. The antisemitism of the socialists protesting Harris over her concession that Israel, indeed, has the right to exist means that they have to pretend to hate the Democratic presidential nominee. But it's clear both in her record and emerging proposals, as well as the concessions of the protesters, that Harris is trying to give them nearly everything they asked for — it just turns out that even socialists don't love the consequences of their policies.
As the president of a near-evenly divided Senate, Harris served as the crucial swing vote to help enact the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act. This pair of laws form the cornerstones of retiring President Joe Biden's de facto Green New Deal. Those two votes by Harris were responsible for the majority of the excess inflation wrought by "Bidenomics," according to a new study by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. If Harris had gotten her wish of a universal basic income program, inflation would have reached the Civil War's annual 20% inflation rate. And if Medicare for All had been enacted, one of the most ardent demands of socialists and a program Harris co-sponsored as a senator, Mulligan found that inflation would reach the triple digits, possibly spinning out to the speed of Weimar Republic hyperinflation.
Ironically enough, even one of the women with Workers Strike Back understood the relationship between the annual $2 trillion deficits spent by Biden and Harris and the worst cost-of-living crisis in 20 years.
"I think what we know for sure is that under the Biden administration, working people suffered greatly, right?" one anti-Harris protester said. "Inflation was a major feature. In fact, the economy is something that's on all of working people's minds going into this election, and they're really dissatisfied with the 'Bidenomics' that has claimed to really have improved our economy, and we know it improved the economy for the super wealthy, but working people didn't see a massive improvement. In fact, they saw their paycheck stretching even further because inflation was a major feature. Rents didn't stop going up, prices of groceries didn't stop going up, right? And so even the student debt cancellation that he promised kept getting dwindled down further and further."
As we have previously detailed at length in this column, inflation indeed hit every social strata of America, but it hasn't harmed all people equally. The overall consumer price index has risen more than 19% since Harris took office, nearly triple the Federal Reserve's maximum annual inflation target of 2%. Based on my analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data , the average renter in the lowest quintile of earners, however, has experienced a staggering 32% increase in prices, whereas a homeowner in the wealthiest quintile of earners saw just 12% cumulative inflation. Further, the real average weekly wages of the entire lowest quintile of earners dropped by 5% compared to a mere 2% pay cut for the top quintile of earners.
Even the World Socialist Web Site, which demonstrated with full force outside the DNC, understands this, even if it misstates the cause.
"The U.S. economy is sustained through rampant government spending on military rearmament and continuous bailouts of major corporations," the WSWB wrote in pamphlets distributed in Chicago. "The federal debt is doubling every decade and is being financed through currency debasement and debt monetization."
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So close! Yes, the tax of inflation is exactly what is funding "Bidenomics," but it's not being spent on defense, which is dramatically falling as a share of GDP. Rather, a full 78% of federal revenue collected so far in this fiscal year is being spent on entitlements (see: the generational wealth transfer of Social Security and the socialized healthcare of Medicare and Medicaid) and interest on the national debt, the latter category that alone already has superseded all Pentagon spending.
It's not that socialists hate Kamala Harris, who has more or less tried to give them everything they're asking for. It's just that everybody, socialists included, winds up hating the consequences of collectivism.
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