Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Kammunism

By Judd Garrett

Barack Obama’s father was a communist politician and economist from Kenya. Pete Buttigieg’s father was born in Malta and was a Marxist professor at the University of Notre Dame. Tim Walz has numerous connections to communist China, and purposely chose to get married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Kamala Harris’ father was born in Jamaica and was a Marxist professor at Stanford University. These are the people who are the power brokers in the modern Democrat party. So, it only follows that the Democrat nominee for President, Kamala Harris, would propose Marxist centrally administered price controls on food and grocery prices as the centerpiece of her economic plan. 

I have a great business idea, invest your lifesavings in a business that will lose money and go out of business, who’s in? Let’s get this straight, the Democrats have artificially driven up the price of labor by increasing the minimum wage; they have artificially increased the cost of your overhead by driving up energy prices; they are pushing for a carbon tax on the energy that you use to run your business; they are making it more costly to do business with increased taxes and regulations; they have caused hyperinflation which increases the cost of everything; and then they want to artificially drive down the prices that you charge for your goods. Sounds like a plan. It will cost more to produce food, but you will get to charge less, and these supposed geniuses think that this will work.  

If there is no profit in producing goods, then the goods will not be produced. Would you work for free? Would you work 40 hours a week for someone else and not get paid? Of course not. So, the people who are producing the food that ends up in the grocery stores are not going to risk their capital or devote their labor to produce something if there’s not a profit in it. Nobody would do that. Do you think farmers are going to get up at 3:30 in the morning and work six days a week until the sun goes down and get nothing for their effort? You can’t increase labor costs, increase fuel costs, add taxes and regulations on business, and then demand that they lower prices. Everywhere price controls have been tried, they have failed disastrously. 

Only someone who works in Washington, DC can come up with something this out of touch to reality. But have you seen our federal budget lately? Our federal politicians spend $1 trillion more than they take in on a yearly basis, and they all think that that’s okay because no one objects. That’s how they can come up with this ridiculous plan of price controls. They do not live in the real world. They are not spending their own money, and if they need more money to spend, they pass legislation to take it from someone else, or they simply print it. When you work in a system that has created $35 trillion of debt and can casually overspend by $1 trillion each year, you have no concept of how a business balances its books. A farmer cannot just go into his barn and print $10,000 to cover a deficit; he cannot just loan himself money that he has no intention on paying back; he cannot snap his fingers and take money from his neighbors to pay his debts.  

The biggest reason why the average American is having a difficult time merely buying groceries these days has everything to do with rising inflation and burdensome taxation, both are a result of out-of-control spending by the federal government. Inflation and taxes are taking a big chunk out of what the average American earns and can buy, and that is why average Americans are having a difficult time paying their bills. The money that should be in their pockets was spent by the Biden-Harris administration to pay off their political donors – the ones who helped them get elected/rigged the election.   

In the first 18 months that Biden and Harris were in office, they signed three multitrillion dollar spending bills on top of the $7 trillion the federal government already spends, and those bills are the primary driver of the inflation that the average American has been combatting. High grocery prices is not a result of corporate greed. It’s not grocery stores gouging the public. The only entity that is gouging the American public is the United States federal government, which Kamala Harris is leading right now. We are overtaxed because the government spends too much; inflation is too high because the government spends too much. So, while we are enacting laws against gouging American citizens, can they pass an anti-tax gouging law against the federal government? Can we put a cap on how much taxes Americans have to pay? Can we put a cap on how much money the federal government can spend? 

Kamala Harris can put price controls on groceries if she wants to see massive food shortages and starvation in America. Do you want to see high grocery prices? Just wait until many of the food producing companies go out of business because of the price controls, and we have food shortages. There won’t be enough food and the food on the black market will be really expensive. And at that point, genius politicians like Kamala Harris will claim that the best thing to do is for the government to take over the production of food and groceries, like the Soviet Union did, and we will have to stand in line for four hours in the freezing cold to get a quart of milk and a loaf of bread while the politicians who created the problem live like kings and queens in mansions. 

Kamala Harris has also proposed that she would give new homebuyers $25,000 for their down payments because the cost of housing has increased dramatically over the last 3 ½ years, but she neglects to mention that this increase in housing costs was caused directly by her administration’s reckless spending which created the hyperinflation that led to unprecedented interest rate hikes to offset the inflation, and also to the mass illegal immigration which she created that is causing housing shortages. Meanwhile, her proposal of giving homebuyers $25,000 is merely going to increase the cost of housing by $25,000 while also increasing the national debt which will increase inflation, interest rates and taxes. 

This is like, Bill Clinton, in 1994, expanding the federal student loan program so that everyone would be able to afford to go to college, and as a result, over the last 30 years, college tuition has increased over 400% and now students are graduating with $200,000 of debt. So, the federal program designed to make college affordable for everyone, has made it unaffordable for almost everyone. College tuition has become so high as a result of Clinton’s policies that the Biden-Harris administration has proposed having the federal government forgive student loan debt. If the solution to high grocery prices is price controls, how about we put price controls on college tuition? No one should pay $80,000 a year to go to college, nobody. But the Democrats don’t do that because the colleges are the indoctrination arm of the Democrat party, and they do not want to offend anyone in academia. They need to appease their water carriers. The Marxists who run American Universities are all for price controls by the government until it comes to their paychecks, then they become completely capitalists. Once again, they do not realize that the federal government forgiving student loans adds to our national debt which is the driver of inflation which increases the costs to run the colleges which increases tuition. 

The genius central planners never learn the lesson. Price controls have been tried time and again across the globe for the last 100 years, and they all caused shortages of everything in the countries where they were implemented. They always fail, but the Marxists keep trying them because they think they are the special ones; they are the smart ones. The most ironic part of Harris’ entire economic proposal is that the only way a Kamala Harris presidency would have a chance at success would be if she did the exact opposite of what she’s running on; if she chose a completely lasses-faire approach to running the government, then she would have the least amount of ability to screw things up because she is not smart enough to make decisions for other people. The more she wants to plan for everybody else, the more she wants to control, the worst everything is going to be. But the most ironic part is, that if we were to elect a central planner to dictate the price of goods in our economy, we would not choose somebody who speaks in word salads and cackles incessantly. Do you want that dictating our lives? 

There’s an old saying about politicians, they create a problem, and then convince the voter that they are the only ones who can fix the problem. There is no clearer example of that in modern politics, than the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign. Every problem that she says she’s going to fix in America if she is elected President, was created by her administration when she was Vice President – the border crisis, the inflation crisis, the crime crisis, the fentanyl crisis, the housing crisis, the homeless crisis, the Ukraine war, the war in Israel. Every single one of them has been created by the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration, and she is running a campaign claiming to know how to fix every problem that she created. And every solution that she is offering is only going to make every problem she created even worse.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.