Asked if he believed in infant baptism, Mark Twain reportedly replied: “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it done!” Today, adding to humanity’s history of magical beliefs, we will soon see the bane of inflation banished by this nifty idea: When prices rise, order some federal bureaucrats to bark at them, “Stop that!”
Adding a dash of substance to her one-word political program (“Joy”), Kamala Harris says that as president, she would tell the Federal Trade Commission to first define “excessive” price increases, then prosecute the living daylights out of the miscreants responsible for cornflakes costing (by some undisclosed metric) too much. She who is in the administration that has approved spending in trillion-dollar tranches thinks that understanding inflation in terms of mundane matters such as supply and demand is for weaklings who do not grasp the marvels that muscular government can accomplish. Next? Perhaps legislating that lobsters shall grow on trees.
Harris, to whom the private sector is as foreign as Mongolia, has added this filigree to her platform of magic: Because houses cost too much, she proposes a $25,000 subsidy for first-time buyers. She would solve the problem of a commodity’s high price by increasing monetary demand for it. What could go wrong? This:
When people clamored that a college education costs too much, caring government subsidized students. College administrators, not being ninnies (at least not about elementary economics), raised tuition to capture the subsidies. During a Harris administration, expect sellers of homes to first-time buyers to tack $25,000 onto their asking price.
Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s Harris-esque contribution to this year’s magical beliefs expands upon his 2016 promise that Mexico would pay for his “beautiful” border wall. Now he says China, like all nations that export goods to the United States, will somehow pay the additional tariffs (the rates he mentions vary with his whims) that he promises to impose on everything from everywhere. So remember: When you pay, say, 20 percent extra for an imported appliance, you did not really pay it. Magic!
Protectionism, which amounts to blockading one’s own ports, is, always and everywhere, a tax on consumers. At this point, it is unknowable whether Trump’s tax-increase-by-tariffs would be larger than the potential increase from — this prospect horrifies him — Congress allowing some of his 2017 tax cuts to expire.
He also promises to cut energy costs in half — in 100 days or less. And the six-times-bankrupted financial wizard says he will lower auto insurance costs — details pending. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic” got here 59 years ago: “… if the music is groovy / It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie.”
But why let details spoil a magical summer of romance? Frank Sinatra sometimes said “Summer Wind” was his favorite recording: “All summer long, we sang a song / And then we strolled that golden sand / Two sweethearts, and the summer wind.” The song does not, however, end happily for “my fickle friend, the summer wind.” Until then, to the two great love affairs of the Western imagination — Romeo and Juliet, and Abelard and Heloise — must now be added the affair between the U.S. media and the Harris-Walz ticket.
Today’s sophisticated journalists are unlike those hard-bitten, fedora-wearing journalistic skeptics in the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play “The Front Page.” Their successors in today’s newsrooms have tumbled base-over-apex for Harris, she of hitherto hidden — very hidden — depths, and for the grandpa coach, paragon of “Midwestern values” that have suddenly smitten the press corps.
Perhaps in 2028, when, one way or another, Trump is no longer a threat to end everything good (democracy, the pitch clock in baseball, etc.), journalists will resume their skepticism. But do not count on it. The next Republican presidential nominee, be he or she ever so mild, might not cause the media to revert to something like impartiality. Habits are hard to break, especially a habit as fun as being the light heroically fending off darkness.
Before Nov. 5, imagine two outcomes that might leaven the depression sensible people will feel on election night: Trump loses, and loses Georgia, and his electoral vote margin of defeat is smaller than Georgia’s 16 votes. This would be condign punishment for picking a gratuitous fight with the state’s deservedly popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Or Harris loses, and loses Pennsylvania, and her electoral vote margin of defeat is less than Pennsylvania’s 19 votes, which she might have harvested had she ignored her party’s anti-Israel, sometimes antisemitic progressives by running with the state’s deservedly popular governor, Josh Shapiro — “Genocide Josh,” to the woke. Either outcome would be magical.
