No matter who wins the White House, your economic prospects are at risk
The ballots have arrived, so now voters, armed with black-ink pen and election guides, can sit down and perform their solemn, time-honored civic duty: deciding which candidates they loathe the most.
This election will see plenty of hate-voting in action (“I hate this candidate, but not as much as I hate his/her opponent”), as well as a number of races left blank by voters who find the choices equally repugnant. Nowhere will that be more true than at the top of the ballot in the race for president of the United States, and on no group of issues will that be more true than with those having to do with the economy and business.
Donald Trump is a narcissist, a bully, intellectually lazy and lacking, a serial liar. He picks fights with people he would be better off ignoring, continues fights he has already won and is abusive to those who could be allies, supporters and friends. Why anyone would go to work for him, given the way he treats people he himself appointed, is one of the great questions of the age. His improbable election four years ago increasingly looks to be the product of his opponent’s dreadfulness rather than his own attributes.
Joe Biden is no prize either. He has not had a single original political thought in his career, certainly not since he was channeling Neil Kinnock. His political principles are limited to whatever the audience before him wants to hear. As to Biden’s verbal incoherence — the man could barely stumble through the recorded pitches for money that used to be ubiquitous on YouTube — that would be a concern were it not for the fact that he has never been known for his speaking skills, much less any thought behind what he says. Humorist Dave Barry wrote one of the greatest columns of all time mocking Biden and other senators for their performance during the Clarence Thomas hearings. That was in 1991.
If there is anything a large majority of Americans can agree on, it’s that neither of these clowns should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office, even on a visitors tour.
Unfortunately, one of them already is there and the other is likely to be if the polls are to be believed. That spells trouble for the economy, your job and your financial well-being, as well as the long-range economic prospects for you and your kids.
The election of 2020 should be about three important and interconnected economic issues. Unfortunately, the candidates, knowingly or not, are in agreement on ignoring the first issue, and they have no concrete or effective ideas for dealing with the other two.
The issue to be ignored is the size and growth of the federal deficit and debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government ran a deficit of $3.3 trillion in the fiscal year just concluded, and the debt level hit $20.3 trillion. Those numbers aren’t going to get any better no matter who is elected. Trump and Biden are both honoring the political tradition of buying votes with the voters’ own money, through pledges of new spending programs.
The federal government can get away with this so long as it can find a buyer for its debt. The worrisome aspect is not just the size of the debt — although, combined with state and local government debt loads, as well as business and personal debt, that’s plenty enough to worry about — but the interest rates being paid on that debt. The Federal Reserve cannot squash interest rates to zero forever, and, when they begin rising, the increased debt service is going to eat huge chunks out of government budgets. We haven’t even gotten to the more unmentionable issue of what to do with Social Security when all it has left is a fistful of IOUs issued so the government can spend money now.
The debt-and-deficit squeeze won’t be helped by Big Issue No. 2, COVID-19. The viral pandemic hits the economy and its participants in two ways. First, it drives up expenses — think of all the money being spent on personal protective equipment and treatment of the ill, and all the money that will be spent for development and distribution of a vaccine. Second, it drives down economic activity and tax revenue — think of the industries like restaurants, tourism and live entertainment that have been essentially wiped out. The longer the pandemic persists, the deeper and longer lasting the damage will be.
The candidates can bicker all they want about who should have been saying what and when, as well as who can throw more money at the economy to prop it up. But even the federal government can’t do that forever, lest it make the deficit bulge even worse. To date, no plan has proven effective over the long run in containing the virus or preventing a resurgence in cases. The candidates would actually gain some credibility were they to say, “There are some problems government can’t solve. This is one of them.”
Big Issue No. 3 is China. Trump has won some support for at least raising the issue of China’s rapacious behavior in trade policies; he has undercut his own case by the inconsistencies in applying countermeasures to them, thus convincing the Chinese to ignore or wait out the latest round of bluster. Biden, meanwhile, won’t do more than issue a few mildly worded complaints; under his guidance the United States will settle back into its pattern of slow competitive decline.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive catalog of the candidates’ various deficiencies (the entire paper lacks sufficient volume for that) or the issues on which they will be found wanting. But just those three issues alone, huge though they might be, should be enough to convince voters they’re being asked to choose between flavors of misery. It might be weeks before we know the official winner of the election of 2020, but the losers are already well established: your economic prospects, your wallet and your job.