August 2, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Another 352,000 unemployed in June as Biden-Harris economy teeters on edge, 1.47 million more unemployed since beginning of 2023
By Robert Romano
The U.S. unemployment rate once again ticked up in the month of June to 4.3 percent as another 352,000 Americans said they were unemployed, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Markets are crashing in response.
Overall, 1.47 million more Americans say they’re unemployed since Dec. 2022, with the number of unemployed now up to 7.16 million, the highest since Oct. 2021 following the Covid recession.
That’s surely a bad sign for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who now inherits the Biden economy she has overseen by his side.
The unemployment rate is now higher than the Federal Reserve and the White House Office of Management and Budget’s projections for 2024, with the Federal Reserve having previously projected unemployment to continue rising to 4.1 percent in 2024, and the White House having said unemployment wouldn’t get above 4 percent in 2024.
They were both wrong. Instead, the unemployment rate rise from its April 2023 low of 3.4 percent to now 4.3 percent.
The Biden administration clearly underestimated how much unemployment would occur as a result of the post-Covid inflation overheating the U.S. economy — and much of the future unemployment may yet be on the horizon.
According to the Department of Labor, as of July 20, unadjusted unemployment continuing claims is now up to 1.94 million compared to 1.82 million a year ago. That’s not good!
Another good indicator to watch on that front remains the spread between 10-year and 2-year treasuries. This spread tends to invert prior to recessions, and then uninverts as the unemployment rate rises.
Well, right on schedule, the 10-year-2-year is at -0.08 percent as of this writing and may be about to uninvert itself for the first time since 2022, and is well above its -1.07 and -1.08 percent readings in March and July 2023, respectively.
This is what usually happens after inflation peaks, households max out their credit cards and spending slows down. Eventually the layoffs kick in.
Inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and the growth of consumer credit peaked at 9.9 percent annually about the same time in April 2022. But in May 2024 consumer credit growth has slowed down significantly to just 2 percent. And inflation has similarly slowed down to 3 percent over the past 12 months in June, although prices are still more than 21.6 percent higher than they were in Jan. 2021.
Whether that makes Harris, who has seen a recent bump in the polls as Democrats have consolidated around her candidacy, a sacrificial lamb remains to be seen. The economic concerns that might make holding onto the Presidency more difficult for the incumbent party.
Can Harris assure the American people that the economy remains strong if unemployment keeps rising as usually happens during recessions? If the Fed and the White House could not properly evaluate the lingering impacts of inflation and their aftereffects on the economy including labor markets, what hope is there that Harris will?
Harris supported all of the spending and borrowing that fueled the inflation as the M2 money supply grew by almost $7 trillion during and after Covid.
She now owns the economy, owns the inflation and owns any present and future unemployment that ensues, with more than 1.47 million more unemployed since peak employment.
Biden and Harris’ best story to tell voters in 2024 is rapidly coming to an end — and so too might Harris’ hopes of getting elected in November. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Issues & Insights: Harris Gets Caught In A Big Fat Lie Right Out Of The Gate
When CNN calls out a Democrat for lying, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. That’s just what happened last week, after Kamala Harris’ first campaign rally.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” she said in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. Like, we know we got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.
“When you read it,” she goes on, “you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. They intend to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back, then, to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.”
CNN, to its credit, read the 900-page document, or at least skimmed it, and in an article headlined “Fact check: Harris falsely claims Project 2025 blueprint calls for cutting Social Security,” it reports that:
The Project 2025 document does not show that Trump intends to cut Social Security; the document barely discusses Social Security at all and does not propose cuts to the program. In addition, contrary to Harris’ suggestion, Project 2025 does not call to ‘end’ the Affordable Care Act or eliminate its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The document does criticize the Affordable Care Act, especially the law’s expansion of Medicaid, but makes clear it is advocating changes to the law rather than terminating the law entirely. (emphasis added)
In other words, Harris is just making sh*t up.
But that’s not all she’s lying about. The claim that Project 2025 is a “Trump agenda” is also a lie.
Project 2025 is a project led by the Heritage Foundation, which brought together more than 100 conservative organizations to detail a policy agenda that it published in a book early last year called “Mandate for Leadership.” This a guide that Heritage has been publishing every four years since 1980. The purpose is to provide the next administration with an encyclopedia of policy prescriptions endorsed by conservatives. Up until this year, nobody outside policy circles noticed.
Trump himself has repeatedly made it clear that his campaign wasn’t involved in Project 2025 and has lately started calling some of its ideas “extremist.” Which is an unfortunate sop on his part to the left’s coordinated campaign to demonize the policy document.
The Project 2025 lies had gotten so bad that Heritage had to put up an entire page debunking them, and internet memes started popping up making fun of the horror stories being spread, such as the one below.
Last week, the Harris team admitted that it’s been lying about Project 2025.
A campaign official told CNN that Harris “made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump’s policies” as “Project 2025,” since they believe “it has stuck with voters.”
In other words, lying is fine, so long as it’s for the “greater good” of defeating Trump.
It’s still lying. After Project 2025’s director stepped down, with the Trump campaign cheering that on, the Harris campaign said “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.” And then it repeated the lie about how it includes “cuts to Social Security and Medicare, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, dirtier air and water, and empowering Trump to destroy American democracy.”
Expect much, much, much more of the same from Harris over the next three months. Just don’t expect the rest of the corporate media to do what CNN did and call her out on any of it.
To view online: https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/01/harris-gets-caught-in-a-big-fat-lie-right-out-of-the-gate/