It's A Good Economy. Kamala Harris Should Run On That!

She can prosecute the case against Trump's constant lies, so to speak.

Kamala Harris speaks at the SEIU / CAP Action Fund’s 2019 National Forum on Wages and Working People in Las Vegas. Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0

One of the many frustrations of Democrats in this election cycle is that even though the Biden-Harris administration has delivered the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any of the industrial democracies, too few Americans seem inclined to believe it. Climate and infrastructure improvements, and one of the strongest records on job growth and low unemployment — sure, they’re happening, but wait, isn’t Biden old? And inflation following the pandemic was the highest anyone’s seen since the 1970s (when it was far higher), so even though eggs are cheap again, and the US inflation rate has cooled a lot, we’re still being told that no one can afford food, so we’re all eating our EV batteries instead.

Please stop that.

While Joe Biden was having the worst night of his political life at the June 27 debate, Donald Trump got away with spraying lie after lie, especially on the economy during the years of his misrule and since, leaving Biden struggling to refute a mountain of bullshit. That was made even worse by CNN’s decision — inexplicably agreed to by both campaigns — not to provide any real time fact-checking. That left the job to Biden, and we all saw how Trump steamrolled over his attempts to drag at least some truth into the discussion.

So hey, says Bill Scher, politics editor of Washington Monthly, how about letting Harris have a go at Trump’s lies about the economy, especially since 1) she has the facts on her side, 2) she knows how to argue a case and shoot down bullshit, and 3) she helped the economic recovery happen. As a sort of non-incumbent, at least at the top of the ticket, Harris is well-positioned to push the “are you better off than four years ago?” argument with fresh vigor.

And Crom knows it’s needed, with polls showing perceptions of the economy that have little to do with reality, but which feed right into the lies Trump spewed at the debate.

“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well,” Trump falsely crowed. “We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression,” he claimed, leaving out the part when Biden pushed through additional pandemic relief.  

Trump also lied extravagantly about the post-Covid recovery, claiming that “The only jobs [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounceback jobs; they’re bounced back from the COVID.” That’s flat out bullshit; the economy made up its pandemic job losses in June 2022 and has continued growing ever since, with six million new jobs beyond the nine million “bounceback” jobs achieved two years ago. And no, those jobs weren’t going to undocumented immigrants, but to American workers, whose wage growth has for the last year outpaced inflation, resulting in greater buying power. Seventy-five consecutive months of economic growth are nothing to sneeze at.

Update/correction: 75 months would be more than six years, so I shouldn’t have copied that figure from Scher without checking. We had negative GDP growth in the first two quarters of 2022, so it’s been 22 months of growth since then.

That said, yes, not everyone is doing great, because that’s how capitalist economies still work, and that sucks. But as we’ve noted previously, the parts of the country that lagged behind the rest of the country from 2000 to 2016 have, under Biden and Harris, seen greater job growth in each of the last three years than at any time this century, finally making up lost ground (but still behind the rest of the country.)

Harris, who knows a thing or two about making a pointed argument, is in an excellent position to start correcting the record, laying out the case for the administration’s handling of the economy, and perhaps most importantly, drawing sharp comparisons between the Biden-Harris strategy of growing the economy for the middle and working classes, not the investor class that owns the Republicans. And she can vividly point out just what a disaster Trump’s announced economic policies will be for ordinary families: tariffs on all imported goods, rampant inflation, and a wasteful and job-wrecking war on immigrants — all parts of a sober economic analysis by those woke lefties at the Wall Street Journal.

And hey, if she laughs at the irony of that, so much the better.

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[Washington Monthly / Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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