Time has finally caught up with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous economic policies.
Global markets tumbled on Monday, sparked by sharp declines in leading US indicators, a worse than expected July jobs report and fears that the dollar will weaken in the coming months.
The sum of all fears — a hard recession — is again looming after President Biden squandered his time in office jacking up unproductive government spending, subsidizing key Democratic voting constituencies with costly handouts and gaslighting the public Soviet-style whenever any negative economic news reared its ugly head.
Since Biden entered office in 2021, he has overseen annual budget deficits of $2 trillion a year, thanks in part to his student-loan bailout plan and other giveaways.
The 1.3 million public sector jobs he’s added kept unemployment figures artificially low — and with no significant firings or layoffs among government workers, last week’s spike in job losses meant they’ve come almost exclusively in the private sector.
Facade falls before elex
Biden’s irresponsible strategy ballooned the national debt by $7.9 trillion, boosted inflation and drove up interest rates.
Its obvious political goal was to keep a lid on deeper economic problems while the incumbent president was still campaigning for re-election.
Since Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee in a backroom sleight of hand last month, hyping that delusion has assumed peak importance.
Now the lie is falling apart. After steadily rising over the past few months, unemployment stands at its highest level in three years, accompanied by a worsening national affordability crisis, rising consumer debt and persisting inflation.
In response to Monday’s sell-off, Wall Street’s VIX index, which measures market turbulence, spiked to its highest level since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. A prospective interest rate reduction widely expected from the Federal Reserve next month turned out to be a classic case of too little, too late, if it comes at all.
Even as the election campaign gets nastier, most Americans will face November poorer, angrier, deeper in debt, more frustrated and less certain of their futures than in any election since Jimmy Carter — whose fecklessness eerily resembles Joe Biden’s — unsuccessfully sought a renewed mandate in 1980.
That’s bad news for Harris, whose campaign has advanced no economic policy of any kind, while Biden and most congressional Democrats favor tax hikes, yet more debt-based government spending and no meaningful solution to illegal immigration, which has enduring economic consequences.
No confidence
Investor confidence is sinking like a stone, with the worst recent losses suffered by leading companies in the tech sector — a longtime engine of American economic growth that seems to be breaking down in a mire of declining profits, flawed products, consumer mistrust and, ironically, a decaying relationship with its traditional allies in the Democratic Party.
No one on Wall Street trusts either the lame duck incumbent or his anointed successor — and, on Nov. 5, she may well discover that most Americans don’t, either.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
