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HARRIS & BIDEN: Historically High Inflation
On July 13, 2022, PBS.org reported: “Surging prices for gas, food and rent catapulted U.S. inflation to a new four-decade peak in June … Consumer prices soared 9.1 percent compared with a year earlier,… the biggest yearly increase since 1981, and up from an 8.6 percent jump in May.”
During the Biden-Harris administration’s first 42 months in office, from January 2021 through July 2024, consumer prices in the United Staes increased by 20.2 percent…. This represented the worst inflation record the U.S. had experienced since the Jimmy Carter administration of 1977-1981.
HARRIS & BIDEN: Opposed Trump Tax Cuts
Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign website said: “Under her plan, she’ll reverse President Trump’s trillion-dollar tax cut for big corporations and the top 1%.”
During the 2020 vice presidential debate, Harris said: “On day one, Joe Biden will repeal that [Trump] tax bill. He’ll get rid of it.” Similarly, at an October 30, 2020 campaign stop in Texas, Harris said to a cheering audience: “I promise you this — as a first order of business, Joe Biden and I are about to work to get rid of that tax cut.”
HARRIS: Her Contributions to Massive Inflation
In August 2024, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stated that “much of America’s inflation since 2020 has resulted from” two votes in particular that Harris, as the tiebreaking vote in a 50-50 Senate, cast in favor of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021 and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “These laws didn’t reduce inflation,” said WSJ. “They caused it. Together, they increased federal spending by more than $3 trillion. A new study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity finds that such a fiscal surprise translates to at least 6% higher consumer prices in an economy the size of the U.S. Therefore, Ms. Harris’s two votes were responsible for at least half of the excess inflation (beyond 2% annually) that occurred between 2020 and 2024.”
“If Ms. Harris had gotten her way fully,” added WSJ, “inflation would have been even worse. While a senator, Ms. Harris introduced in 2020 the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act, which would have paid most U.S. residents $2,000 a month until three months after the pandemic emergency’s official end. Had that bill become law, payments would have continued through August 2023 and cost an additional $15 trillion. Cumulative inflation would have been more than 50%, rather than 20%, between December 2020 and July 2024.”
HARRIS & BIDEN: Massive Tax Hikes of All Kinds
As of late August 2024, Harris endorsed the tax policies put forth by President Biden in his most recent budget proposal. These included:
HARRIS: $15 Minimum Wage
Most studies of minimum-wage hikes in countries all over the world demonstrate that when governments impose artificially high wage rates on businesses, not only do overall employment rates drop, but young, inexperienced, and low-skilled workers are affected far negatively more than anyone else. An American Enterprise Institute analysis puts it this way: “Artificially raising wages for unskilled workers reduces the demand for those workers at the same time that it increases the number of unskilled workers looking for work, which results in an excess supply of unskilled workers. Period. And another term for an ‘excess supply of unskilled workers’ is an ‘increase in the teenage jobless rate.’”
Nonetheless, Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign website said: “To raise wages, Kamala will fight to … make a $15 minimum wage the national floor.”
HARRIS: Suddenly Calls for Tax Deduction That Democrats Had Long Opposed
In early September 2024, Harris, in an effort to curry favor with voters in the upcoming presidential election, proposed that the $5,000 maximum tax deduction which small businesses could claim on their start-up expenses should be increased to $50,000 – an idea that mirrored several earlier Republican bills that Democrats had opposed almost unanimously. In 2018, for example, the House of Representatives had passed a bill seeking to increase the deduction to $20,000 – legislation that was supported by every House Republican as well as the Trump administration, and was rejected by nearly every House Democrat.
HARRIS: Price Controls
To address inflation, which she blames chiefly on corporate “greed,” Harris in 2024 proposes top-down government price controls which, if implemented, will only trigger a new round of high inflation. As Joseph Klein explains in FrontPage Magazine:
“Harris proposed a federal ban on ‘price gouging’ by so-called ‘greedy’ food companies and groceries, which would impose price controls on companies that in fact are barely making a profit as it is. Groceries’ average profit margin is 1-3%, hardly enough for anyone with a modicum of common sense to [view] as evidence of price gouging. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris wants federal bureaucrats to decide if the prices that groceries and their food suppliers want to charge for their products are too high and must be blocked by government fiat….
“Such price controls, when tried in the past, have led to disastrous distortions in the economy that caused substantial pain for the average consumer. Producers cut back drastically on production to avoid losses at the capped prices set by the government. When the price controls were temporarily eased to give producers more breathing room, the pent-up demand burst open and pushed prices considerably higher as available supplies of products were not nearly enough to meet the soaring demand.”
BIDEN: Executive Order for $15 Minimum Wage
On April 27, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order increasing the hourly minimum wage of federal contract workers to $15 beginning in January 2022, up from the existing $10.95 minimum wage. Biden’s order also stipulated that the minimum wage would thenceforth be adjusted annually based on inflation.
BIDEN: Opposed Trump Tax Cuts
Condemning President Trump for enacting “irresponsible, sugar-high tax cuts,” Joe Biden, when campaigning for president in 2019-2020, said: “When I’m president … we’re going to reverse those Trump tax cuts.” “Eliminating just a few of the tax cuts” would be inadequate, he claimed. “I’m going to eliminate most all of them.”
WALZ: $15 Minimum Wage
In October 2018, Rep. Walz voiced his support for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in Minnesota.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Price Controls for Drug Companies
The Democratic Party’s official 2024 platform says: “The [Biden-Harris] Administration is … leading the charge against Big Pharma price gouging, by requiring drugmakers that raise prices faster than inflation to pay the difference back to Medicare.”
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: At Least a $15 Minimum Wage
The Democratic Party’s official 2024 platform says: “We … raised the minimum wage for federal contractors to $17.20 an hour, and will keep pushing Congress to increase it to at least $15 for all Americans.”
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: 12 Weeks of Paid Family & Medical Leave
The Democratic Party’s official 2024 platform calls for the creation of “America’s first, full, national paid family and medical leave program, guaranteeing every American worker up to 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new child or loved one to recover from an illness, in cases of domestic violence, or military deployment.”
TRUMP: He Cut Corporate Taxes
In 2017, the Trump tax-cut bill reduced the corporate tax rate from 35%, which was nearly the highest rate in the world, to 21%. Almost immediately thereafter, some 500 major U.S. companies used their tax savings under the Trump tax cuts, to fund bonuses and wage increases for 4.8 million workers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that by the end of 2019, business investment “was 9.4% above its pre-2017 trend,” while real investment for corporations rose 14.2%. Similarly, a 2021 Heritage Foundation report showed that “a key driver in the surge in investment was multinational firms” that, as a result of the Trump tax cuts, “chose to reinvest in U.S. markets instead of offshoring.”
TRUMP: Created a Thriving Economy for All Demographics
“The reinvestment in America that tax reform spurred,” says the Heritage Foundation, “paid real dividends for the typical household, increasing their annual rate of income growth tenfold. Real median household incomes grew by more than $5,000 in 2018 and 2019 alone. By contrast, in the 30 years prior to 2017, real median household income grew by a total of $7,600, or about $250 per year.”
In 2018, the national poverty rate fell to 11.8%, the lowest annual figure since 2001.
In 2019, median household income reached $65,084 — the highest level ever recorded, and a gain of $4,144, or 6.8%, since the start of Trump’s presidency. By contrast, during the final 7½ years of Barack Obama’s presidency the median household income of Americans had risen by a mere $1,043 (1.7%).
Between January 2017 and August 2019, the total number of people employed nationwide increased by 6.6 million.
In February 2020, the overall unemployment rate nationwide was a mere 3.5%, the lowest figure since December 1969.
The black unemployment rate in August 2019 was 5.4%, an all-time low.
The Hispanic unemployment rate in September 2019 was 3.9%, an all-time low.
The Asian unemployment rate in June 2019 was 2.1%, the lowest level since 2003.
The female unemployment rate reached its lowest level in 65 years.
Youth unemployment reached its lowest level in more than 50 years.
During President Trump’s first 30 months in office, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. increased by 499,000 — a 4.0% rise. This was the fastest rate of growth in manufacturing since 1988.
In November 2019, Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon said that Trump’s economy was “the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen.”
TRUMP: Cut Government Regulations Dramatically
Key contributors to the prosperity under President Trump were the unprecedented measures that he took to cut the size and power of government. In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for the elimination of two regulations for every new regulation proposed. In February 2017, he said that “every regulation should have to pass a simple test: Does it make life better or safer for American workers or consumers? If the answer is no, we will be getting rid of it, and getting rid of it quickly.”
During the first year of Trump’s administration, regulatory activity was 74% lower than it had been during the first year of the Obama administration. Curtis Copeland, a former specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said in 2017: “By any empirical measure, it is a level of [deregulation] activity that has never been seen. It is unprecedented.”