No matter how this election turns out, the next president of the United States will be a crackpot.
Donald Trump thinks you can fight Covid with bleach injections. Kamala Harris thinks you can fight inflation with price controls.
No, let me correct that. What Trump actually said was that it would be “interesting to check” on whether you could fight Covid with bleach injections. What Harris actually said was that you can fight inflation with price controls.
On that basis, I’d have to conclude that Harris is the more delusional of the two. Unfortunately, Trump has offered me plenty of additional evidence that he’s right up there in Harris’s league. But she’s made it pretty clear he’ll never actually surpass her.
No, Trump did not recommend bleach injections. I do not think he even uttered the word “bleach”. All of the fact-checkers agree that this was a lie put out by Biden and other Trump-haters.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/24/context-what-donald-trump-said-about-disinfectant-/
After hearing a presentation on methods for disinfecting covid from a surface outside the body, he said it would be interesting for medical doctors to check whether lungs could be disinfected. Nothing wrong with what he said.
Here is the Harris position:
“In her remarks Friday,” it concluded, “Vice President Harris will discuss her lifelong commitment to fighting for the middle class and tackling powerful interests by invoking her time as California’s attorney general and going after corporate greed and price gouging — and winning.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/business/kamala-harris-price-gouging-inflation.html
I think Trump has other problems of the economic type. I read somewhere that he plans to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods from all countries (And I think he’s even mused about a 20 percent tariff), with an extra-punitive rate of at least 60 percent on goods from China. Some have estimated that this would raise costs for the typical American family by at least $1,700 a year. There’s a winning platform!
Serious question for the economists:
While clearly more distortionary and not throughout the supply chain, can a case be handwaved it is a step towards racing consumption a bit like a VAT? And finally raising revenue from the middle class to pay for its goodies?
And if we will get spending from left and right, would we be better of with a ton of debt and borrowing with MMT on the left, or tariffs and slower growth but some middle class revenue and hopefully less debt (yeah, king of debt but ok, go with it).
Come on, of course you can fight inflation with price controls. If Harris claimed that you can eliminate inflation with price controls it would sound closer to delusional. I doubt you could produce a quote from Harris making that claim. Are you really arguing that it’s delusional to think that if all the buyers of a product agree they will not pay a higher price then that would be a powerful disincentive for the seller to raise the price?
I suppose you’re just trolling here, but I would have expected you to have a little more insight into the game aspect of political campaigning. The publically articulated justifications a normal, skilled politician makes for the actions they’re proposing comprise whatever words they think are most likely to lead to them having the power to take those actions *or other unrelated actions*. That’s the correct strategy if they really want to win. I think I learned to think like that in part from one of your books, so why are you acting like it’s reasonable to take them literally? They aren’t educators, they’re running for office.
Steve Ruble (#4): If your grocery gets cut in half, what are you going to do with the money you saved? Buy an extra tank of gas and drive up the price of gas? Save it and drive down the interest rate to make it easier for **me** to buy an extra tank of gas? Or what?
There are only two ways to affect the price level: Change the supply of money or change the demand for money. Which of those do you think you can change with a price control on groceries?
Harris perfectly exemplifies my long held belief that it is not lack of understanding economics that gets in the way, but rather active sabotage of economic thinking.
She does not believe that.
Candidate says x
Candidate’s lead economist says, Don’t worry about x, the Candidate was only lying.
To paraphrase Kamela:
It was a campaign.
Trump was talking about bleach, he was talking about ultra-violet light. There was an Israeli group doing research on exactly that, to disinfect.
He was edited to make it sound that he was, insanely, suggesting you inject bleach.
Once you look at the constant, intence and co-ordinated attacks on Trump, including mostly outright lies, you have a strong signal that Trump is not the problem.
Of course, that should read “Trump was not talking about bleach”
I don’t have anything on topic to say other thsn that I love the more frequent postings. When will you post every day like old times again? Or better yet…DO A PODCAST!
In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries.
— Ortega y Gasset, The Rise of the Masses, 1932
So the conventional wisdom of what Trump did/said is incorrect here. And incorrect in a way that Trump, in fact, is not as bad as reported. This same story has played out often. It should make one question the story about any reports of egregious behavior by Trump.