Bidenomics Works--Part II

 Popular Economics Weekly

Calculated Risk

September’s unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent but reported just 12,000 new payroll jobs due to the hurricanes and Boeing aircraft strike of 30,000 machinists.

Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), following an average monthly gain of 194,000 over the prior 12 months, said the BLS. In October, employment continued to trend up in health care and government. Temporary help services lost jobs. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity.

That makes it a sure thing the Fed will continue to lower short-term rates at their November FOMC meeting. Also that economic growth will continue into the new year.

Health care added 52,000 jobs in October, in line with the average monthly gain of 58,000 over the prior 12 months. Governments added 40,000 jobs but manufacturing lost 46,000 jobs, which is probably because of the Boeing strike.

Calculated Risk’s graph shows us just how good President Biden’s Bidenomics policies have been. More than 16 million jobs have been created since January 2021 as we returned to work from the brief COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

But with the Presidential election upon us, our future prosperity is still in doubt. We should take Elon Musk at his word when he said at the Madison Garden rally that he would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget if Trump wins, and he is appointed efficiency czar. It would lead to economic disaster, even for his Billionaire supporters.

“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously,” said Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate.

And we should believe what Trump says, according to Mary Trump, his niece, as Trump becomes more irrational, threatening anyone he now perceives as his enemy, including Taylor Swift, so that her boyfriend Kansas City footballer Travis Kelce has told him not to mess with his girl!

“Donald Trump is offering a vision of crony rentier capitalism that has enticed many captains of industry and finance. In catering to their wishes for more tax cuts and less regulation, he would make most Americans’ lives poorer, harder, and shorter,” said Stiglitz.

Timothy Snyder in the introduction of On Freedom, the sequel to his best-selling On Tyranny, tells us why we have a sociopath bordering on psychopathy as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States of America.

“Deep into a century that was the stuff of dreams in the 1970s, and the subject of confident predictions in the 1990s, we find ourselves at a turning point. Whether we will be free will depend on us—not just on what we do, but on why we do it: our ideals.”

It’s a sad commentary that one of our political parties chose a leader that wants to tear down those institutions that have preserved our democracy; created properity for many; then attack the Capital on January 6 to attempt to overturn the 2020 election,.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Harris Presidency

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

What would it mean for Kamala Harris to be our first female President? It’s a historical turning point that affirms women have finally attained equal political rights to men, and American citizens s confirm they want greater personal rights—to expanded health care, abortion, and environment protection that has been held back by a dominant male culture until now.

Should Harris and the Democrats win it would also signal the end of the Second Gilded Age, an age characterized by record income inequality that began in earnest when President Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies began to transfer massive amounts of wealth from working adults (small business and salaried) to the owners of wealth (capital assets) in the 1980s.

cbpp.org

It would give President-Elect Harris a mandate to begin to reverse the tax structures that were the major cause of the record inequality by raising corporate and personal tax rates back to Reagan-era levels, and thus begin to reduce the massive budget deficits that resulted.

President Reagan and Republicans cut the maximum personal tax rate for the wealthiest from 50 percent to 28 percent and reduced corporate taxes from 34 to 28 percent to initiate what economists call the Second Gilded Age, which resulted in our first massive deficit--$400 billion—by the end of his administration.

The massive deficits continued to grow under successive Republican administration tax cuts that resulted in curtailing our social safety net. GW Bush’s deficit grew to $1 trillion, and the Trump administration’s to more than $5 trillion.

A Harris Presidency could also mean an end to our ongoing civil war, a war originally between the industrial North vs. slave-holding South that never really ended with General Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Though slave-owning was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln’s north winning the civil war, southern states found ways to continue to impoverish former slaves by terrorizing them under Jim Crow laws that even the civil rights acts of the 1960s couldn’t completely eradicate.

Today’s manifestation of our civil war has morphed into a battle between red states controlled by Republicans with a white male/Oligarchic culture continuing to impoverish their own citizens vs. more prosperous blue states with a dominant female/minority majority.

Kamala Harris has promised in her platform and speeches that she would be a President for all Americans. That would mean policies benefiting red state citizens as well, such as raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 that was last raised in 2009.

Currently 14 states haven’t raised their minimum wage since then, or at all. Five red states have not even adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour, so that in all seven of these states, the federal minimum wage guarantees at least a $7.25 per hour wage. New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are the only blue states still with the federal minimum wage.

There are other ways the red states have kept workers’ salaries lower that Harris should remedy: lobby to repeal so-called right-to-work laws in 26 states that say members of a union aren’t required to pay union dues even though they enjoy the benefits. The result is that membership in unions has declined, along with workers’ rights to bargain collectively. And those 26 states now have a Supreme Court majority to enforce those state laws.

Democratic majorities have always found ways to benefit more Americans since the New Deal. President Obama was able to pass Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, the first universal health insurance that meant insurance companies couldn’t ban clients with existing conditions.

Climate change has become a clear and present danger causing more hurricanes, floods, wildfires threatening Americans that Donald Trump has called a hoax, and would rather “Drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has already begun work on reducing global warming with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidizing alternative energy sources that don’t increase global warming but that the Republican Party vociferously opposes to protect its fossil fuel constituents.

We have lived through a Gilded Age before. The first Gilded Age came in the late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution made Robber Barons such as railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, banking titan JP Morgan, and Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller the richest men in their time.

It ended with the death of President William McKinley in 1901, and revelations of rampant corruption followed by Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that created government institutions such as the Federal Reserve to regulate banking and social security, as well as empowering labor unions to level the playing field for workers.

If elected, Kamala Harris and Democrats should be able to continue the new New Deal legislation that President Biden’s Bidenomics’ policies have initiated with more than $5 trillion invested in keeping America great and creating 16 million jobs that have benefited all of our citizens, not just Oligarchs such an Elon Musk.

Musk warned, after all, what would happen if he became the efficiency czar Trump says he wants him to be and cuts $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. There would be no money left for social programs, the military, and drastic cuts in social security and Medicare benefits, say economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

It would also mean Husband Doug Emhoff would become the first, First Gentleman, which wouldn’t diminish the historical record of great First Ladies. Men should take heart that women have equaled men in all ways, not just in intelligence and courage, but have shown a heart large enough to create a United States, not a Divided States of America, when Kamala Harris becomes our new President.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen