How to tell Kamala isn't polling well

The press is dumping on her economic plan. USA Today gave permission to its Nicole Russell to write:

Let's be real: What's wrong with giving a hardworking family who wants to be homeowners money for a down payment? What's wrong with describing inflation as "price gouging" and forcing companies to keep prices at a rate set by Washington? What's wrong with giving a $6,000 tax credit for a family with a newborn? (I favor some child tax credit scenarios, as long as they don't become welfare programs.)

Most of these are ideas rooted in a socialist approach to economics − one that's been shown over and over again to fail.

Harris' policy ideas stem from thinking that the government, not the people, is the most powerful entity in America. So the vice president has no problem with an economic agenda that expands government's reach and power and places burdensome restraints on the free market.

Voters should reject Harris' economic ideas. Instead, they should embrace ideas that aid the free market, encourage personal responsibility and cut taxes to help more Americans thrive.

Sir Rupert Murdoch gave permission to his newspaper in NYC to dump on her.

His New York Post went old school in its editorial reacting to Kamala-nomics:

Kamala Harris wants price controls to pretend it’s not her fault you can’t afford groceries.

The editorial ended, “It’s Bernie Sanders’ party now, it seems, and we’re all going to have to pay the piper. Kamala, in short, promises to hurt average Americans even more than her boss Joe did.”

Jeff Bezos gave permission to Catherine Rampell in his Washington Post to take time off from hating the Orange Man to lay it into Brown Sugar.

Rampell lit into price controls:

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

That’s because, among other things, the legislation would ban companies from offering lower prices to a big customer such as Costco than to Joe’s Corner Store, which means quantity discounts are in trouble. Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies. Posting cost and pricing plans publicly is a fantastic way for companies to collude to keep prices higher — all facilitated by the government.

This demand for more information comes from the same government that won’t tell you who was in charge of the Secret Service detail that allowed a sniper to fire several rounds at President Trump.

What surprised me more was the Bezos Post editorial board hammering Kamala.

It said, “Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them. Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”

And it mocked price controls.

One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business. She vowed to go after “price gouging” by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined “federal ban on price gouging.”

My conclusion is price controls will hurt Amazon.

She is cutting and pasting this policy, just like she copied JD Vance’s child tax credit increase. Price controls are not new. FDR used them to fight deflation. And Truman used them to fight inflation.

Nixon used them. It led to oil shortages and runaway inflation.

Gene Healy wrote, “On Aug. 15, 1971, in a nationally televised address, Nixon announced, ‘I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.’ ”

What triggered this? Nothing. Healy wrote:

There was no national emergency in the summer of ’71: unemployment stood at 6 percent, inflation only a point higher than it is now. Yet, after Nixon’s announcement, the markets rallied, the press swooned, and, even though his speech pre-empted the popular Western Bonanza, the people loved it, too — 75 percent backed the plan in polls.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman correctly predicted, however, Nixon’s gambit ended “in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.” The people would pay the price — but not until after he’d coasted to a landslide re-election in 1972 over Democratic Sen. George McGovern.

By the time Nixon re-imposed a temporary freeze in June 1973, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw explain in The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, it was obvious that price controls didn’t work: “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.”

Healy blamed Congress, which had delegated powers to Nixon he did not deserve. Nixon used those powers in a manner that showed why we don’t delegate so many powers to the president.

Even CNN is dumping on Kamalala-dee-dah Economics. Its Scott Jennings said:

The other thing that I picked up on today was this whole notion that price gouging or gauging as she called it is what people are feeling. That is a total canard. This is not true. This is made up because they're trying to deflect attention from the actual inflation that has caused everything in your life to get more expensive. So they need the American people to believe something other than the truth, there is no price gouging. Grocery stores, these things, they operate on very slim profit margins. There is no gouging, there is just inflation.

So to go out and say, I'm going to get the federal government involved in setting prices are capping prices or interrupting the flow of the free market economy — let me tell you something. If you like, bread lines, product shortages, black markets, hoarding, if you want to recreate the happy economic conditions of The Walking Dead, Kamala Harris has a plan for you.

The bottom line is, the Republicans are going to be all over this. It's not smart and its a plan from a ticket that has no private sector experience and no — and no interest whatsoever and taking responsibility for everything they have done to plunge the working class of the United States of America and do an economic crisis.

The New York Times however is stuck in 1917 and pushing communism. Its Jim Tankersley cheered Kamala on. He wrote:

In Raleigh on Friday, Ms. Harris began to put her own stamp on the brand of progressive economics that has come to dominate Democratic politics over the last decade. That economic thinking embraces the idea that the federal government must act aggressively to foster competition and correct distortions in private markets.

The approach seeks large tax increases on corporations and high earners, to fund assistance for low-income and middle-class workers who are struggling to build wealth for themselves and their children. At the same time, it provides big tax breaks to companies engaged in what Ms. Harris and other progressives see as delivering great economic benefit — like manufacturing technologies needed to fight global warming, or building affordable housing.

None of those things are the business of the federal government. The government exists to protect your God-given rights. Fostering competition, correcting distortions and building affordable housing are not in the Constitution. If it is not in the Constitution, it is not allowed.

But in NYT’s world, the government is always in control. For an outfit that decries colonization, it sure wants to have Davos colonize the world with 15-minute cities, carbon taxes and eating bugs.

And it wouldn’t be the paper we have grown to groan about if it failed to make a substantial error. On Trump’s call for higher tariffs, Tankersley wrote, “It is a foundation of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda and, in many cases, a break from the conservative economic orthodoxy that long dominated the Republican Party.”

Wrong.

Here is what Abe Lincoln said 29 years before he became president, “I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.”

Tariffs made America an industrial giant.

Free trade made Red China.

Price controls will make America what Venezuela has become.

The press in general is all for that. News organizations do not look the other way when it comes to censorship; they demand it. But now they oppose price control and for a very good reason. Price control leads to reduced supply, as Healy pointed out. Food shortages won’t be popular.

Her economic program, which plagiarizes Karl Marx, is only one worry for Democrats. The party is coming apart over its support of Hamas.

Josh Kraushaar tweeted, “House Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention next week are being advised by congressional security officials not to book hotel rooms under their own names or engage with protesters if confronted.”

Why is that?

Collin Rugg tweeted, “100,000 anti-Israel protesters are expected to descend on Chicago for the DNC next week.”

The Democrat anti-Semitic roots are showing. The KKK hated Jews as well as black people. I doubt the media will pay much attention to the pro-Hamas protests — but the protests will make the party choose sides, making it difficult for Democrats to carry both Michiganistan and New York.

Big Government — be it fascism, socialism or outright communism — does not bother the press. Suddenly, though, price controls do. Hmm. Something is up. It is not as if the price controls harm newspapers, TV or social media.

The only logical explanation is she is Mike Dukakis 2.0 with Tim the Tom Eagleton as her running mate.