September 6, 2024

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

No more Americans employed than one year ago as U.S. economy sputters. Is Kamala Harris out of touch?

By Robert Romano

There are no more Americans who say they are employed than one year ago, the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ household survey shows for the month of August, with 161.43 million saying they have jobs, compared to 161.5 million in Aug. 2023.

On a year over year basis, that’s actually 7,000 fewer jobs than a year ago. And, once again, that’s what usually happens at the end of economic cycles after peak inflation when peak employment is seen and then, sometimes gradually and sometimes rapidly, succumbs to increasing joblessness.

In fact, unemployment is up by 1.4 million since its Dec. 2022 low, and the unemployment rate has gradually ticked up over a similar period, from an April 2023 low of 3.4 percent to the current level of 4.2 percent.

Generally, whenever overall employment begins decreasing on a year over year basis, as it is now, it led to recessions.

In 1949, 1953, 1958, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2001, 2008 and 2020, employment began contracting during the recession. In 1961 and 1971, it reached the point of contraction on a 12- month basis immediately following the recession.

And in 1952 and 1957, it decreased but then bounced up again before succumbing to recessions with negative employment growth about a year later. So, it’s a terrible signal, and indicates no matter who wins the election in November, whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, that is the situation they will be dealing with.

Either way, with a slowdown or worse seemingly imminent, prices will likely come down all on their own, along with interest rates. If there is any good news that comes out of the economic situation, that might be it, and hopefully any upswing in joblessness will be low and temporary.

So, what would the candidates do to make it better? Trump released his economic plan on Sept. 5, calling for boosting energy and other domestic production, cutting regulations and removing wasteful government spending to reduce prices by increasing supplies and controlling the money supply, which will bring down interest rates — and promises to keep them there.

Harris earlier released her own plan, with calls for subsidies to homebuyers and home builders to increase housing stock (which might fuel prices and result in a bubble via overproduction) as President Joe Biden and Harris have largely postponed their green fantasies in favor of a Trumpian increase in oil production, although Trump says he would go much further.

But there is also an unwillingness, usually on the part of the incumbents (in this case, Harris), to accept reality that there is any economic weakness, whereas Trump is more than willing to highlight those weaknesses as a failure of the incumbent party.

Decreasing employment takes away the one good story that Harris had to tell about the economy and recovery after Covid. Now, the recovery seems to be over.

In the meantime, personal incomes still have not kept up with consumer inflation since Harris took office. So, how the American people feel about their personal finances will undoubtedly factor into the equation. 

With just two months until the election, another question is whether the press and the American people will demand more specifics from Harris, who appears to believe that she can coast to victory merely on the incumbency advantage owed to first-term administrations. On the other hand, ignoring reality didn’t really help Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush or Herbert Hoover, who each easily lost amid downturns.

Trump when he had a recession in 2020 responded with a robust plan to keep small businesses afloat and by the end of the 2020, more than 16 million of the 25 million jobs temporarily lost in the Covid lockdowns had come back — and Trump barely lost. So, having policies ready to address to the current situation has their virtue. Whereas, putting your head down and hope they all go away might be a recipe for being viewed as out of touch.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/09/no-more-americans-employed-than-one-year-ago-as-u-s-economy-sputters-is-kamala-harris-out-of-touch/

The Left’s Duplicity on Women’s Rights is as Confusing as it is Disturbing

By Manzanita Miller 

The radical left has made “women’s rights” the focal point of the election this fall, hoping to galvanize women to deny former President Donald Trump a second term through fearmongering, while conveniently ignoring the reality that they are eroding women’s safety and opportunity at virtually every level. Keep in mind, these are people that for the most part, will not even define what a woman is, so they can hardly be counted on to know how to protect one. 

While the left has hurled insults at Trump, warning of a pseudo “Handmaids Tale” if he is elected, the reality is that the globalist left’s self-serving agenda is harming women across the board. From abandoning school-aged girls to shower and change next to biological males to erasing women from women’s sports and opening the southern border to countless criminals, the left’s record on protecting women is nonexistent. 

The radical left has erased safe spaces for women and girls at an alarming rate, allowing men who claim to be transgender to enter women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, and even female-only prisons with little more than a beard and a verbal confirmation that they identify as “female”.  

In April the Biden Administration issued a new rule blocking conservative states from passing legislation that would protect school-age girls from being forced to share bathrooms with men who identify as women. The rule is a direct blow to conservative legislatures which have been attempting to pass legislation protecting girls from the discomfort and harassment that results from being denied spaces of their own.

While the agenda-driven mainstream media is reluctant to adequately cover the reality of allowing young men into women’s spaces, assault happens and is crippling to its victims. Just last fall in Alexandria, Virginia, the family of a young woman filed a $30 million lawsuit against the Loudoun County Public School system, alleging the school did little to protect their daughter from being assaulted by a male student who was “wearing a skirt” in the women’s bathroom at the time.

When women aren’t defending themselves from the left’s attacks on basic privacy and safety, they are defending their rights to exist in women’s sports. The bleak reality is that by erasing the biological definition of a woman from public discourse – and law – a day is rapidly approaching when women will be erased from sports. 

The left has apparently not learned from the public outcry after the swimmer Lia Thomas, born a male, won the NCAA Division I national championship for the first time in history in any women’s sport after winning the 500-yard freestyle as a biological male. Thomas was a mid-range swimmer when competing against men – he was 65^th on the men’s swim team when swimming at the University of Pennsylvania – but “she” beat out every female on the women’s team, taking 1^st place when competing against women.  

Then there is the border. The Biden Administration’s sieve-like border is a dire national security disaster for the United States as a whole, but it poses particular risk to the most physically vulnerable – namely women and children.  

Under the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous Open Borders agenda, approximately 10 million illegal alien encounters have been recorded by Customs and Border Protection. Then there are the 2 million or so “gotaways”, illegal aliens who may carry alarming criminal backgrounds, who have entered the U.S. but fled Border Patrol agents and are presumably inside the country to this day.

Now, close to three years from the date of President Joe Biden’s highly criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan, radical Taliban militants have regained power in the area and are rapidly dismantling any semblance of women’s rights in the country. 

According to an article from the New York Times, the Taliban government has driven women from public discourse, stripped opportunities for education beyond the sixth grade from their hands, and even banned women from public spaces.

With unchecked migration into the United States, bringing with it value sets that run contrary to core Western values around women’s autonomy, is there any guarantee the same can’t happen in the United States over a few decades?

Latin America – where the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are streaming in from – is not exactly known for its positive treatment of women. In Mexico 10 women die a day as a result of “femicide”, the intentional killing because of their gender. In El Salvador, the most dangerous country for women in South America, the rate of “femicide” is nearly 10 times the global average.

Open Borders zealots do not appear to care that hundreds of thousands of criminals with no sense of Western values are breaking our laws, entering our country, and doing God knows what once they are here. No sane individual with an interest in protecting women and children would be able to support the Biden-Harris approach to foreign policy, immigration, and domestic issues with a straight face. The assault on women is very real, but it is blatantly obvious who is perpetrating it.

Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/09/the-lefts-duplicity-on-womens-rights-is-as-confusing-as-it-is-disturbing/