By Steve Nicklas, 8-26-24
It may be one of the greatest magic tricks ever. It rivals Houdini escaping chains and Pete Buttigieg disappearing on paternity leave, when the former small-town mayor shirked his responsibilities as transportation secretary while cargo ships clogged U.S. ports.
When 818,000 jobs vanished into suspicious air last week, even the complicit media gasped. The seismic revision in the national employment numbers for the past year came from the official scorekeeper, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet another ill-equipped agency within the dysfunctional government of AWOL President Joe Biden and absent Vice President Kamala Harris.
In realistic words, the Biden/Harris administration inflated the job numbers to sugarcoat the economic picture during an election year. And the watchdog media crowed each month about a robust employment picture in the comedy called “Bidenomics.”
The restatement is as significant as Harris now saying she supports fracking, in an attempt to woo voters in Pennsylvania as part of her presidential campaign. Even a second-grade student could find articles and videos and online posts of Harris opposing fracking. Yet the Green New Deal zealot now says she supports it.
If you remove the 818,000 fake jobs, U.S. employment has been anemic. Worse yet, most of the legitimate new jobs have gone to foreign workers, including illegal immigrants. Many of these positions are also part-time, according to sources.
And many new jobs in the past year are in government and healthcare. These sectors both involve government spending. So these are hardly valuable private-sector jobs.
You wonder about the accuracy of other U.S. economic statistics provided by the Biden/Harris administration – about unemployment, inflation, economic growth, retail and manufacturing, etc. The financial markets react after these vital numbers are released.
Harris has not commented on the restatement, but her commerce secretary did. In an interview, Gina Raimondo didn’t know about the revision and replied, “I don’t believe it,” because she thought it came from Donald Trump.
Harris hasn’t commented on much since her coronation as Democrat presidential candidate. However, she has ridiculed political opponent Trump more times than the media called her the “border czar” over the past three years. And that’s a lot of times.
Most of the Harris policies have frightening overtones of totalitarianism. She wants to raise taxes on corporations, on stock buybacks, on realized and unrealized capital gains. Harris is advocating a 28 percent corporate tax rate, higher than enemy and rival China. And her proposed capital-gains tax rate of up to 44 percent would devastate the real estate and stock markets.
“That would make America the least-attractive country for investment in the entire world,” said conservative commentator Sean Hannity. “It would be the destruction of our capitalist system.”
Currently, capital-gains tax rates are capped at 20 percent. There are no taxes on unrealized gains, however. A new Harris-backed tax on unrealized gains would apply to assets like brokerage/IRA accounts, private businesses, real estate holdings – and even potentially your house. This tax rate would be up to 25 percent.
Harris released her hazy economic plan several weeks ago during a speech in Raleigh, N.C. before a tiny crowd. “Gorbachev in Russia would have thought it was a radical speech,” cracked Newt Gingrich, a former U.S. congressman who pioneered the groundbreaking “Contract with America.”
Gingrich interprets taxes on unrealized gains this way. “If your house goes up in price, in value, the government can step in a say ‘give me the money’ (for the taxes on the gain in value). If you don’t have the money, the government can step in and say ‘give me the house.’ It makes Venezuela look normal. It makes Russia look normal.”
Steve Nicklas is a financial advisor on Amelia Island and an award-winning columnist. His columns appear in weekly newspapers in Northeast Florida. He has published a book of his favorite columns, “All About Money.” He has also done financial reports for area radio stations. He can be reached at 904-753-0236 at [email protected].
