Op-Ed: Well golly gee shucks – Somebody finally mentioned the US economy

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is expected to focus on bringing down costs – Copyright AFP Yasuyoshi CHIBA

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. After 8 months of pure political irrelevance, the real world finally got a mention in this election. The absolute apocalyptic catastrophe of cost-of-living issues has finally been acknowledged.

(It’s worth reading that link for a brief outline of a very demanding subject. How do you fit the details of “Raising the Titanic” into one article? Or a speech, for that matter?)

It’s extremely hard to describe the sheer insularity with which this subject has been so thoroughly ignored.  You’d think Americans were digging caves to live in just as a nice change from their penthouses.

Harris has taken the non-medieval approach, including a Federal ban on price gouging. It’s got so bad that even the expression “price gouging” needs to have some sort of legal status, like anti-trust or monopoly.

None of these price rises needed to happen. Quite the opposite. Everyone was as smug as usual about their profits and future earnings. Then prices for everything went into orbit.

After so long on extremely low interest rates, when they went up debts did hit some businesses and investors. Not all of them.

Certainly not the property sector, which typically manages its finances with electron microscopes. These guys lock in every cent a year in advance. These aren’t amateur investors. The interest rate moves really only affect mortgagees and investors with overvalued portfolios. So, rents miraculously went up in multiples on the hint of an opportunity.

The corporate world, which just coincidentally happens to own a vast number of US residential properties it just coincidentally bought for almost nothing after 2008, is also cashing in. Odd how a massive crash in property values could do that.

The only real validity in the interest rates argument in this situation is that if you’re in debt all the way up to your very iffy balance sheet, They aren’t.

Then there’s food. Food prices do vary, yes, but not by this much. Nor are hamburgers an endangered species.  The way these prices are going, they could be extinct. You’d have to go to the Smithsonian to see one.

It says a lot about the total illiteracy of the business world that nobody sees how suicidal these price rises were and still are. If you’d stayed awake for 5 seconds in any sort of basic business course, you’d know that.

The price rises include all the economic fundamentals from burgers to bathrooms. Retail is a shambles. Online businesses aren’t singing the praises of price rises, either, by the way. Not one sector of the economy has escaped unscathed.

These problems have as usual gone around the Western world. The world isn’t doing much about it. Progressives hate it, and the New Improved No Opinions Conservatives have to agree with it.

What’s new, you ask? Not a lot.

Harris is also talking about increased corporate taxes. Amazing what happens if you dodge taxes for decades, isn’t it? If you don’t pay, your businesses have to pay.

Trump, meanwhile, blames Harris and Biden for inflation. It’s mainly his donors gouging, but according to him, his “economic miracle” economy, which added many trillion to the national debt, was doing fine. He wants more tax cuts which will add a possible $7 trillion more to the deficit. He didn’t actually say, “Let them eat speeches”, but that seems to be the message.

Meanwhile, back in the year 1024, where most of these policies originally came from, it’s Ideology R Us, again. One of Trump’s advisors thinks deregulation actually lowers prices. It never has, worldwide. Competition is supposed to lower prices but mainly causes cartels which uphold prices.  

The good news is that somebody is finally, so many years later, raising the economy as an actual issue.