November 1, 2024

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

368,000 fewer Americans report having jobs in October, 150,000 more unemployed in last jobs report before election. Is Kamala Harris in trouble?

By Robert Romano

368,000 fewer Americans reported having jobs in October and 150,000 more said they were unemployed in October, according to the latest household survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the last report before the Nov. 5 presidential election between incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris and challenger former President Donald Trump.

Overall, 161.49 million said they had jobs, which is about what it was a year ago, when it was 161.28 million in Oct. 2023. That’s usually what happens during periods of peak employment towards the end of the economic cycle after peak inflation and the economy overheating — as inflation cools amid sinking demand as households max out their credit, the economy tends to start shedding jobs. When it gets particularly bad, that’s when slowdowns or recessions occur.

In fact, there are 1.286 million more unemployed from the low of 5.7 million in Dec. 2022, 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 4.1 percent.

In the establishment survey of employers, only 12,000 jobs were added by employers, well below market expectations, and would is almost certainly a very bad sign of what is ahead. 46,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in October alone.

Some slowdowns are worse than others, but what the most recent data might mean is that regardless of wins the election on Tuesday, there could still be a bumpy road ahead even as the Federal Reserve has sought to accomplish a so-called “soft landing” for the economy, not seen since the mid-1990s.

As it is, the Fed has begun cutting interest rates, which, again, usually happens towards or at the end of the economic cycle, which it tends to continue doing until unemployment peaks. Then, after the slowdown or recession subsides, and employment rises along with inflation as demand begins increasing, it will begin hiking them again.

This can happen whether or not income and wages have kept pace with the prior bout of inflation, which in this case, they haven’t — consumer inflation is up 19.87 percent since Jan. 2021, while median weekly nominal earnings are only up 18.5 percent. It will take a prolonged period of relatively lower inflation and the wage gains from a positive growth, but this is a slow process.

Thanks to high inflation — it’s only slowed down but prices have not decreased on an overall basis — interest rates are up 70 percent, with large increases in monthly mortgage payments and in monthly consumer credit payments as Americans became increasingly taxed.

It could mean the economy and labor markets particularly are at the tipping point. It’s a nice idea that recessions can be prevented with the right mixture of policy, but at best, they can be postponed. All things come to an end, and with the crappy jobs report and the imminent presidential, the question is whether it also marks the end of the Biden-Harris administration, with Harris potentially suffering at the polls on Nov. 5. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

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

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/11/368000-fewer-americans-report-having-jobs-in-october-150000-more-unemployed-in-last-jobs-report-before-election-is-kamala-harris-in-trouble/

The Left Can’t Stop Criticizing Trump’s “Negative” Campaign but He is Tapping into the Way Most People Feel 

By Manzanita Miller

While the mainstream media and the political left have relentlessly condemned former President Donald Trump for tapping into Americans’ frustration and hopelessness over crippling inflation, stagnant wages, and an illegal immigration crisis, the reality is most Americans are fed up with the direction of the country over the past four years. 

For every article speculating on why Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t further ahead in polling even though she is running a “positive style” campaign, and every mainstream news article criticizing Trump for “taking his doomsday approach to a new extreme”, there is evidence that Trump is tapping into the reality of the way people feel, while Harris is dismissing it. 

From the first speech Harris gave after becoming the nominee, where instead of focusing on her own record she seized the opportunity to accuse Trump of “taking our country backward”, to her speech Monday at Madison Square garden, Harris has perpetually criticized Trump’s tone and rhetoric, while sidestepping criticisms of her administration. 

While a great many Americans still have hope for the future of our country, that hope rests largely on correcting the political missteps that have wreaked havoc on our economy, dollar, border, and standing in the world, and that is why voters resonate with Trump when he points out the failures of the political class.  

A majority of Americans see the last four years as having heavily eroded their own sense of peace and prosperity, and most of the country says they are worse off now than before the Biden-Harris Administration was installed.

The latest YouGov survey shows, for example, that Americans say 64 percent to 25 percent that the country is generally headed in the wrong direction and the public says 64 percent to 20 percent they feel the country has gotten out of control.

Americans say by fourteen points, 48 percent to 34 percent, that they themselves are worse off than they were four years ago, and they say by 22 points, 51 percent to 29 percent that the country is worse off than it was before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed office.

Independents say they are personally worse off than they were four years ago by a two to one margin, 50 percent to 25 percent, and independents assert by a broad 37-point margin, 55 percent to 18 percent, that the country is worse now than when the Biden-Harris duo assumed power.  

Thirty-eight percent of the country says the economy is in poor condition, while 29 percent say it is in fair condition and 22 percent say it is in good condition. A mere six percent of Americans say the economy is in excellent condition after four years of the Biden-Harris economic agenda.

Looking back at the past year, a full 40 percent of Americans say they are worse off financially in the final year of the Bidem-Harris administration than they were one year ago, while only 18 percent say they are doing better than a year ago.

What Kamala Harris and the entrenched political establishment she represents are missing is that it is largely due to their own incompetence and negligence that Americans are pessimistic, and Trump is merely tapping into that sentiment. Voters are reacting to the reality in which they find themselves four years into one of the most destructive administrations in history, and it is Trump, not Harris, who is giving them a voice.

Although they are eight years apart, this election arguably shares more similarities to the 2016 election than it does to 2020. In 2016, Americans were fed up and frustrated with the political establishment, and domestic issues like the hollowing out of the middle class and the influx of illegal immigrants from third-world countries dominated.

Then four years later in 2020, the Black Swan event of the pandemic largely overshadowed domestic issues, and a perfect storm of events led to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being installed in the executive branch. This election is once more, focused on the decline of the middle-class due to globalism, and Trump is the only candidate speaking not only to what is happening but to solutions for it.

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

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/11/the-left-cant-stop-criticizing-trumps-negative-campaign-but-he-is-tapping-into-the-way-most-people-feel/

The Demonization of the Right Continues

By Rick Manning

So now the occupant of the Oval Office has called people who support Donald Trump ‘garbage,’ and believe it or not his designated replacement Kamala Harris hasn’t disavowed Biden’s vitriol.

Beyond the obvious problem that the sitting President of the United States views half of the people who vote in this country as being disposable and less than human, the issue is that this is exactly how the elites in the country view the rest of us.

With all their flowery rhetoric about ‘saving democracy’, the ugly truth is that the billionaires, academics, Wall Streeters, cultural elites and politicians who make up the establishment of America have revealed exactly how they view those who disagree with them.

The bitter clinger deplorables have now had ‘garbage’ added to the epithets hurled at them by those who pretend to preach civility.

The Vice President and her running mate feel completely fine with calling Donald Trump – ‘Hitler’ – even as they support those who would eradicate the Jews as they run wild all over our college campuses chanting for Intifada and that the Jews should be driven out of Israel from the ‘river to the sea.’

In a by-gone age, Americans lived by the credo that ‘sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’  But today, we have a world where adult college students shrink into a puddle of despair or are driven into a rage simply by being exposed to ideas which differ from their programming.

We have people cancelled, driven out of business and threatened with violence for expressing basic commonly held ideas like there are two sexes. Or that men pretending to be women should not play women’s sports due to their genetic advantages.

Back in the day, I would stand at a College Republican recruiting table on some pretty unfriendly campuses, but no one threw anything at me or attempted to tip my table over.  Not today, the very idea of presenting limited government alternatives to the Marxist orthodoxy cannot be tolerated by those who demand toleration for ideas and lifestyles which are well outside societal norms.

And even while eating at a restaurant discussing politics with a friend, those on the left feel empowered to try to intimidate people into silence as I experienced during the Trump administration at a DC area barbecue restaurant. While trying to eat lunch, a well-dressed, professional father with his young boys stood screaming and threatening me in front of my table because he overheard my discussion of a just completed meeting at the White House.  

The left has firmly established that to them, words matter.  

And if words matter to them, it is important to take them seriously when their President of the United States calls Trump supporters garbage.  

You see, making other humans less than you are is an essential ingredient in denying them freedoms and oppressing them in the future, and that is exactly what the left is setting up.

By normalizing the demonization of their opponents, they are creating an acceptance to the idea of suppressing those same voices. 

It is their justification for having the FBI and Department of Homeland Security actively urging private social media platforms to silence voices they do not like and ideas that threaten their worldview.  

And it is their justification for weaponizing the federal law enforcement and judicial apparatus in Washington, D.C. to such an extent that their supporters cheer the imprisonment of their political opponents, even as they justify not prosecuting their leaders for exactly the same offenses.

I don’t know if the American Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again, but I am increasingly certain that the left does not want it to be.  

When those who would prosecute others under the guise of ‘hate speech’ engage in vile characterizations of their political opponents, it is time for the rest of us to believe them.

They do think we are garbage and they do want to deny our voices in a nation built upon the idea that speech is an inviolable right.  

In such a world, how do we come together after November 5?

I can only hope that those who look at half of their fellow Americans and see garbage are really few and far between.  That they are just misguided demagogues with little real following. 

But the silence in the face of the harsh, angry speech by Biden, Harris and Hillary Clinton tells us what we really need to know.

After all it was just four years ago when they lectured us that silence is complicity. 

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://townhall.com/columnists/rickmanning/2024/10/31/the-demonization-of-the-right-continues-n2647010