The economy is easily one of the top issues on the minds of most voters these days. It’s an issue that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have to address.
For Trump, it’s relatively easy. All he has to do is point to what prices and jobs looked like during his presidency and promise to do it again.
Harris, however, has a rougher path. After all, she’s part of the administration that not just was in office when the economy went into the toilet, but she was part of the administration that did literally everything wrong to bring it back under control.
But she’s trying to present things as if she is the answer.
That hasn’t worked out well for her lately.
First, one of her spokespeople got absolutely hammered on it during a recent interview:
So it made sense that when a Harris surrogate, Democratic strategist Kelly Hyman, appeared on Fox on Monday, that host Sandra Smith would ask her what Harris' "plan" was to lower prices.
"There’s a lot of aspects to it in regards to looking at in online," Hyman says.
Let’s talk about lowering the grocery costs because that’s something that’s brought up. The viewers can look at this online. She talks about certain things in regards to advancing the first federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries to set clear rules to the road to make it clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers as well.”
So Smith asks the follow up question all the media should have been asking when Harris throws this out there, "Is that happening?"
Hyman continues to spew, and Smith tries again. "But that price gouging, is that currently happening?" Smith presses.
That's when Hyman implodes.
“In regards — I don’t know exactly if that’s currently happening or not because I’m not privy to that type of information but the people are costing a lot of money in regards to groceries.”
Oh my. You can see Smith blinking at that and saying, "Okay." She probably didn't expect such a complete failure of an answer.
If Hyman is not "privy to that type of information" and doesn't know, why is she acting as though it's a fact? If you can't even say price gouging is happening, why is Harris coming up with this plan? We all know — to deflect from her own responsibility in driving inflation up. Does Kamala Harris know what causes inflation? That it was made worse by her green lighting more spending with her tie-breaking vote on legislation?
Go read the rest of what happened, because that’s just as important, but here, I want to point out that Hyman was tasked with being able to speak on the economy for the Harris campaign, and yet she blew it.
See, Harris needs people to believe that our grocery bills are the result of price gouging because it lets her demonize big business for the problems that she and the rest of the Biden administration either caused or exacerbated while in office. It’s not her fault, you understand, but the evil corporations and she’s going to make it so they can’t do this again.
Which, of course, she couldn’t even if she wanted to.
That would be a bad enough performance all on its own, and I could write an entire post on just that, but it’s not the worst of it.
You see, Harris claims her plan will build a strong economy. People who actually understand economics, however, say it won’t.
A top business school has shot down claims made by Vice President Kamala Harris that her economic proposals would strengthen the U.S. economy.
During a "Unite for America" livestream event in the battleground state of Michigan with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday, Harris sought to persuade the audience that she had an economic policy that would deliver for businesses and for the American people, saying "and that is why Goldman Sachs . . . is why Moody's, which is why Wharton School of Business, which is why 16 Nobel laureates, have collectively determined after analyzing our plans . . . mine would strengthen the economy, his would weaken it."
Keep up with the latest US Election news on Newsweek's Election Live Blog.
When contacted by Newsweek for comment, one of the institutions Harris referenced directly refuted her claim.
"We did not find a positive impact on the economy from her plan in any future year. The Trump plan does increase GDP for a few years but lowers by the end of the 10-year budget window," a spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) said.
…
The model suggested that under Trump, GDP "eventually falls relative to current law, falling by 0.4 percent in 2034 and by 2.1 percent in 30 years". Under Harris, the report found, "GDP falls by 1.3 percent by 2034 and by 4 percent within 30 years (year 2054)".
At this point, we’re better with a plan that increases GDP for a few years than one that does nothing good for us. Especially since those forecasts assume nothing else changes, which at 10 and 30 years, they will.
The next four years are critical for a lot of people, and strengthening the economy is the only possible thing we can do going forward if we don’t want more misery.
Yet it seems clear that Harris is banking on literally everyone buying into the idea that these companies are intentionally fixing prices for no verifiable reason and failing to prepare her people for any kind of pushback or skepticism on those claims. She doesn’t think anyone will see through her BS and is completely unprepared for when they do.
I get that she didn’t start the year expecting to be here. She didn’t even start the summer expecting it, would be my guess. That can explain some lack of preparation, I suppose.
But presidents need to be able to deal with changing situations, and so far, she clearly hasn’t and is instead trying to push nonsense onto the American people.
The terrifying thing is that a lot of people buy it.
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Milton Friedman said “ inflation is always and for all time caused by the government”. Our President said Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore. His VP is clueless Is it bad enough yet?
The even worse part is that not having a plan scores better than either of the plans we're likely to get.