To no surprise, the 2024 presidential election campaign is proceeding just like every other presidential election campaign during a Democrat administration. After four years of intentionally doing its damnedest to destroy America as we know it, the presumed Democrat nominee is lying herself silly about the administration’s track record, and proposing worse-than-band-aid solutions to stop the bleeding.
Perfect case in point:
As RedState reported on Thursday, Harris is proposing what her campaign bills as “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries—setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”
“Price gouging.” Along with “profiteering,” another favorite Democrat scapegoat.
Bidenomics and Bidenflation have wreaked havoc on tens of millions of hardworking Americans throughout the Biden administration. As grocery prices remain stubbornly high, and continue to increase in some categories, what do Democrat politicians do? Find a scapegoat, of course, and who better to blame than evil corporations? What better ploy than to pit Americans struggling to make ends meet against faceless corporations?
Even the Washington Post ran an op-ed on Thursday titled “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?”
Also on Thursday, British author and conservative political commentator Douglas Murray put the paramount choice in the 2024 presidential election — and all presidential elections — into proper perspective, and it couldn’t be more stark.
Kamala Harris believes she knows the choice before the public in November. It is between going “forwards” and going “backwards.” Since the Democratic nominee is wise about the nature of time, she insists that this November, America should choose to go forward.
In fact, it would be good if this country could go back. To the economy we had before Kamala Harris and Joe Biden entered office. Because the most consequential choice there is in this election is between left-wing economics and right-wing economics. Between the economics of Biden-Harris and the economics of Donald Trump.
In some areas of life, the left-right divide is blurry. But in economics, the difference is clear.
Boom.
Murray couldn’t be more spot on. Disagree? Name one area — just one — in which this country or its influence in the world is in better shape than when Donald Trump left office. I’ll wait.
Murray then nailed the “clear difference.”
It is between those who would grow the size of the economy and those who would grow the size of the state.
The specifics are just as clear: fewer regulations, freer markets, fewer restrictions, and certainly not price controls — particularly not price controls in an attempt to put a band-aid on a gaping wound that your own policies caused.
“For once,” Murray wrote, “we can judge the candidates not on their words but on their deeds,” adding: “Unfortunately, this is not good news for Kamala Harris.”
Today the vice president is trying to add some meat onto the bones (such as they are) of her economic plans. These are reported to include efforts to make housing more affordable, lower the costs of living for families, boost small businesses and take on “corporate excess.”
The last of these is simply a left-wing pandering point.
Anyone hoping to stir up the left-wing base can always paint big, bad capitalists and their excessive salaries as the problem. As though anything you did to tinker with top Wall Street salaries would do a thing for working-class Americans.
But on her other proposals, we don’t need to judge how well Harris and Trump could do. We can judge them on what they already did do.
Murray went on to point out that rank-and-file American workers had their highest wage growth in over 10 years during Trump’s four years in office and that the pace of wage growth outpaced the salaries of their supervisors.
He also noted that Democrats like to pretend Trump’s tax cuts only benefited the rich, which he called “simply untrue.”
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) didn’t just massively spur economic growth, it also saw the average taxpayer receive an on-average tax cut of around $1,500.
“Kamala Harris may enjoy talking about minority communities and how much the state needs to help them,” Murray wrote, “but when Trump was in the White House, he helped African Americans and others to help themselves.
During the first three years of Trump’s presidency, median household incomes rose by 15.4% for black Americans and 11.5% for white Americans.
Barack Obama may have talked a great game, but just compare even his results with Trump’s.
Between 2009 and 2015, Obama oversaw an economy in which in six years, median household incomes increased only 2.3% for black Americans and 4.4% for white Americans.
And what about Biden-Harris?
Well, between June 2021 and June 2022 alone, real average hourly earnings fell by a whopping 3.6%. That’s the Biden-Harris economy for you.
While the Democrats talk of equity and racial justice, Trump actually oversaw an economy in which 400,000 new black Americans workers entered the US economy every year. That is compared to an average of just 250,000 in each year of the Obama presidency.
The most important issue that the Republicans can now push is not just how well the economy did under Trump, but how poorly it did under Biden-Harris.
Murray was right, of course — with everything he said. That said, the ugly truth is this:
The Democrat Party’s formula for winning presidential elections is left-wing elitists exploiting (lying to) low-information, useful-idiot, rank-and-file Democrat voters. Yep, it really is that simple.
