MAGA anyone?

MAGA anyone?

I had lunch the other day with a close friend who had on a cap that said “Prosecutor vs Prosecuted”. He is salivating over the prosect that judge Juan Merchan sentences Trump to jail. Never mind that any sentence will be appealed or that the charges were bogus, or that the judge was compromised, or that the judge was biased. None of that matters. What matters to him is that Trump is a convicted criminal regardless of what happens afterwards.

Do you like your cooking? I know a person that along with his wife eats out every night. How can they stand it? I like my own cooking. I make a better pizza than I can buy locally. Also the best chicken enchiladas, chicken and dumplings, venison stew, omelets, meat loaf, salmon patties. I cannot come close to Hattie B’s hot chicken and there is a local restaurant that makes the best baked ziti. However, in the main I would rather eat my own cooking than any restaurant’s.

We don’t know much about Kamala Harris’ thoughts on anything. She is not campaigning on her years as vice president. There are precious few positives. She won’t talk about inflation, immigration, foreign policy, energy costs or anything of substance. She hasn’t been interviewed or held a press conference and the compliant media is letting her get away with it. She opposes Israel’s Gaza campaign but it likely not an antisemite given her husband is Jewish. But I wonder if she supports an arms embargo to Israel. Like hiding Biden in the basement, Harris will hide her views and deny all her previous positions throughout the campaign. The question is whether Trump and Vance are disciplined enough to stay on message rather than simply calling names and defending themselves against a hostile media.

Wouldn’t you like to know how Harris feels about Ukraine? About Israel? About Iran? About China, trade, Taiwan, South China Sea, tariffs? About the EU? About the Supreme Court? Electoral College? DC Statehood?

What we do know is that she likes price controls. She likes Biden’s proposed 5% cap on rents. She embraced rent controls. She wants to increase the supply of apartments but somehow doesn’t realize that rent controls discourage increases in supply. She thinks that giving first time home buyers $25,000 will increase housing affordability. Huh? Won’t this just increase prices by increasing demand? Maybe this is a reverse Say’s Law and here demand creates its own supply. She somehow thinks that food companies are price gouging even though retail grocery prices have jumped less than wholesale prices. She fogets that this is a competitive market and that price increases are due to her administration’s actions. Naturally she would increase government by setting up a bureaucracy to limit price increases. She ignores the fact that price controls lead to shortages in products. Some have called this “communist” seemingly forgetting that the last president to impose wage and price controls was that famous red, Richard Nixon. What Harris is actually showing is that her administration will be to the left of Biden’s. 

Neither Harris nor Trump is talking about economic growth. Harris, being on the left, is in the fixed pie camp where for one party to gain, another has to lose. Any learned person should know better. However, Trump isn’t much better. Instead of embracing growth policies, Trump is a retrenching protectionist. Trump ignores small businesses, the growth engine of the economy. Rather Trump is a big business guy. He shut down small business and left the big ones open during COVID. I wish he would set out a small business agenda. Talk about lessening regulations that stifle business. Talk about targeted tax reduction on small business. Become the small business president. Grow the economic pie. Remind Americans about the power of expanding the pie. Talk about why there are so few poor people in America today and those that are poor would be wealthy if compared to the poor 100 years ago. The only way to make America great again is to make the market great again.