A Recession for Kamala?

How will the economy affect Democrats' chances? The party in charge tends to be, rightly or wrongly, tied to current economic conditions in the minds of voters. So recent economic funkiness—a bad jobs report, trepidation about whether the Federal Reserve will act to ratchet down interest rates, headlines about stock market plunges abroad—could end up very bad for Democratic frontrunner Kamala Harris, reports Politico.

It's not just that, though. It's also that Harris is, to some degree, claiming the Biden administration's accomplishments and priorities (junk fees, student loan debt) as her own. So an economy in shambles would be a liability for her, in addition to the fact that President Joe Biden tasked her with handling the crisis at the southern border, which spiraled out of control and led to a record number of border encounters in December 2023.

"We cannot win if people think we're headed into a recession," William Owen, a Democratic National Committee member from Tennessee, told members of the campaign and the party, according to Politico. "Negative news about the economy is going to weigh down the Harris campaign," Republican pollster Micah Roberts told The Wall Street Journal.

"TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!" wrote former President Donald Trump, inartfully, on Truth Social, as he unloaded message after message blaming yesterday's global stock sell-off on Democrats. The economy, and the degree to which a president affects things like unemployment and stock market downturns, is obviously not as simple as he's portraying. But also, he is right to blame "Bidenomics"—which Harris has touted—for a significant part of Americans' economic woes. Reason has done the same.

Biden's policy vision "had many facets—pandemic aid, industrial policy, handouts for labor unions and public workers," wrote Reason's Peter Suderman earlier this year. "But in many ways, it could be reduced to a single, overriding response: government spending."

"Bidenomics was, at heart, a philosophy of throwing money at programs, people, political allies, and favored constituencies," continues Suderman. "That spending contributed directly and significantly to the rapid rise in inflation that helped fuel voter dissatisfaction with the state of affairs."

The outstanding question remains whether Harris' proposed policies would align with Bidenomics or something less (or more) fiscally damaging. Right now, she's mostly chosen to ride out her honeymoon period campaigning almost entirely on vibes, with nary a policy proposal in sight.

Is the economy even as bad as headlines claim? "The decline in the S&P 500 comes less than three weeks after hitting an all-time high and its percentage decline to date hasn't even met the 10% threshold commonly defined as a correction," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Despite the rise in the unemployment rate, other economic indicators, such as retail sales, payrolls and industrial production, are still growing. Stocks fell by more than that twice when Trump was president, in 2018, without signaling recession."

They're not being Pollyannaish or contrarian; there really are mixed indicators that make it quite unclear where we're headed. "Everything about the economy is noisy," Jason Furman, an economic adviser to former President Barack Obama, told the Journal. It's unclear where we're headed.

The main thing that is clear, though, is that both Harris and Trump will blame economic conditions on the other party, and both of them will be a little bit right when they claim that the other will make life more expensive for the little guy. Harris' continuation of big-government Bidenomics or Trump's likely 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods (with possibly higher for those coming from China) would both be bad for Americans. Let's hope our economy is durable enough to withstand the policies of whichever bozo takes office.

Scenes from New York: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park back in 2014 as a joke. He found the bear as roadkill and stuffed it in his car (along with an old bike) before heading to Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg. Then needing a way to get the bear out of his car, he left it in Central Park with the bike, trying to make it look like a cyclist had hit it. I mean, who among us?

QUICK HITS

• "Whether Monday's wild gyrations mark the final bang of a global selloff that started to build last week or signal the beginning of a protracted slump is impossible to know. But one thing is clear: the pillars that had underpinned financial-market gains for years—a series of key assumptions that investors across the world were banking on—have been shaken," reports Bloomberg. "They look, in hindsight, a bit naïve: the US economy is unstoppable; artificial intelligence will quickly revolutionize business everywhere; Japan will never hike interest rates—or not enough to really matter."
• Really good explanation of what's been happening in the U.K. under Keir Starmer by thinker/musician Winston Marshall.
• Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a massive defeat for Google, specifically its dominance in search, in the biggest antitrust decision in 25 years. "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," wrote Mehta in his ruling.
• "As the site of nearly 200 French nuclear tests from 1966 to 1996, French Polynesia developed fast. Before it started detonating nuclear weapons, Paris gifted Tahiti its first airport and modern port. Polynesians employed by the nuclear industry left their palm-frond homes to live in newly built housing blocks on Tahiti, the largest of the territory's 120 or so islands. Tourists arrived, too, lured by the coral-edged beaches and tales of a mighty wave at Teahupo'o," writes The New York Times on the complicated legacy of the French in Tahiti.
• Kamala Harris just picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—the man who started the recent trend of getting on TV and calling Republicans, especially J.D. Vance, weird—as her running mate.
• Checking in on Walz:

Lying about being deaf to try to get out of an arrest is actually the most Larry David move possible https://t.co/p0LhmEzede

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) August 5, 2024

• This terrible gentle-parenting influencer (who goes by "Mrs. Frazzled") deserves to be skewered:

"I've never been good at understanding how the economy works," so I plugged some shit into ChatGPT and scrolled Center for American Progress bc Kamala has no policies on her site and doesn't speak to press, and then I just uncritically accepted whatever they told me! INFLUENCED! https://t.co/BWFZ02JphW

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) August 5, 2024