December 19, 2018

Will Democrats Get the Pre-Election Recession They Want?

Between now and the 2020 election, job and income prospects for tens of millions of American workers may fall victim to a politically induced recession.

“[Members of Congress] are the Servants of the People, sent together to do the People’s Business…” —Benjamin Franklin (1785)

Three months ago when stock prices were at record highs, The Washington Post’s Beltway elitists declared, “A record-breaking market doesn’t matter to most Americans.”

Really? More than half of Americans own stocks and other types of investments, including their homes, the values of which are dependent on a strong economy. More than one-third of corporate stock value is held in lower- and middle-income Americans’ retirement plans, such as IRAs and 401(k) accounts, and the value of their equities is down significantly this year.

Of course, the WaPo was lamenting the fact that most of the value of equities held by Americans is in the hands of 20% of investors. Ironically, a sizable chunk of that is held by Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest individual in the world. Ironic because Bezos, who owns the WaPo, is a charter member of the mega-rich Archenemies of Liberty Club — leftists who use their wealth to fund Democrats and socialists and their free-enterprise wrecking-ball policies. Those policies most negatively impact American workers.

For the record, Bezos has an estimated worth in the $130 BILLION range. Or, to put it another way, Bezos makes more money in 10 seconds than his average Amazon employee makes in a year. Additionally, much of his newspaper’s elite Beltway readership lives in five of the nation’s richest counties.

The Bezos/WaPo hypocrisy notwithstanding, the wealth created in equity ownership is reinvested in companies and creates jobs for all Americans — which is to say, all Americans have an interest in a strong economy reflected in stable equity prices.

But that report was from August.

Now, according to financial analysts: “Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 are on pace for their worst December performance since 1931, when stocks were battered during the Great Depression. The Dow and S&P 500 are down 7.8 percent and 7.6 percent this month, respectively. December is typically a very positive month for markets.”

The Left’s primary print propagandist, The New York Times, assessed this situation: “The market has been buffeted by a range of concerns, from signs that the trade war between China and the United States is beginning to weigh on global growth to worries that higher interest rates will eat into corporate profits. … When the dust had cleared, the S&P 500 was down 2.1 [percent] for the day and 4.8 percent for the year. Should the market fail to recover, 2018 would be Wall Street’s worst year since the financial crisis a decade ago. This year’s sell-off is nothing like the collapse of stocks a decade ago, when the S&P 500 fell more than 38 percent. But in its own way, 2018 is emerging as a remarkable year for financial markets, with almost every type of investment and asset class — stocks, bonds, commodities, even safe Treasuries — posting negative or minuscule returns.”

And the most recent survey of chief financial officers for U.S. companies found that 50% believe that the economy will be in recession by the end of 2019. Almost 80% think a recession will hit by the end of 2020.

So, what’s going on? After all, when Donald Trump was elected, the economy soared to new heights by virtually every measure. The administration’s tax cuts, passed by Republicans in Congress, fueled the economic engine. And regardless of Wall Street’s collapse after the November elections handed Democrats control of the House come January, Americans on Main Street were doing well.

But now, after second-quarter GDP at 4.2% and the most recent quarter at a very healthy 3.5%, the equity markets are tumbling — which reflects an erosion of business confidence in the economy – confidence which is directly related to the prospects of Trump’s reelection, and continuation of his economic and regulatory policies which revitalized our economy last year.

Why?

The Democrat Party and their Leftmedia propagandists are doing everything they can to set up the pre-election recession they need to defeat Trump. They know the best way to achieve that goal is to undermine confidence in our economy, a model they perfected ahead of Barack Obama’s 2008 election. That includes obstructing and undermining Trump at every turn, and they are pulling out all the stops to do just that.

The proverbial 800-pound gorilla most responsible for the downturn in the equities markets is the anticipation of significant political instability, the most influential deterrent to economic stability, now a certainty under the incoming House Democrat majority and their “Trump Resistance Collective.”

As Trump had previously noted, “If the Democrats take over the House or Senate, there will be disruption to the Financial Markets,” and that disruption is proving very unfortunate for especially blue-collar Americans, who Democrats once claimed as their constituents.

The Trump administration came into the midterm election with an extraordinary record of achievements.

Democrats, on the other hand, had nothing to run on but their “Hate Trump” platform, campaigning, in effect, against peace and prosperity. The midterm election was, therefore, a referendum on Demo voter IQ and the Demo/MSM’s chokehold on their opinion. Clearly, Democrat voters are not a very intelligent lot.

But the Democrat Party outspent Republicans by more than two to one — spending fueled by the aforementioned leftist billionaires and their ActBlue socialist cabal, which gave Democrats more than $1.5 BILLION in 2018.

Consequently, Democrats retook the House, promising to take Trump down!

Their most likely angle of attack?

It probably won’t be Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s dead-end Russian collusion investigation, which we now know was sparked by the fake Russian dossier funded by Hillary Clinton and her DNC hacks, and then promoted by her political sycophant, former FBI Director James Comey and his deep-state operatives.

Two years into that charade, even some of the “journalists” who originally advanced the dossier conspiracy are doubting its veracity. Most notable among them, Michael Isikoff, who filed one of the earliest wire reports on the dossier, now says many of its claims “will never be proven and are likely false.” In this case, Isikoff does not get class credit for “better late than never.”

So I conclude House Demos will focus on accusations of campaign-finance violations, which fit neatly into the Democrats’ “stolen election” narrative, to fuel corruption and impeachment charges. They may even follow through with threats of impeachment against Justice Brett Kavanaugh in order to further appease their largest constituency, women voters.

The House will haggle over such charges, hanging them over Trump’s head until the day after the 2020 election, at which time if Trump is re-elected and Demos retain House control, they will impeach. Of course, if the GOP retains control of the Senate, that goes nowhere.

And the consequence of the Demos’ political games: Caught in the political crossfire are tens of millions of American workers and their families whose jobs and income prospects will fall victim to the Demos’ politically induced recession — the direct result of having thrown economic confidence under the bus in order to attack Trump.

May I remind you, there is precedent for Democrats seeding economic recession under sitting Republican presidents ahead of presidential elections. Recall how, in 2006, they set up the 2008 mortgage financial crisis (almost collapsing the entire banking system) just in time for Barack Obama to ride that wave of fear into office.

Remember in October of 2006, even Bill Clinton admitted, “The responsibility that the Democrats have may rests more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress … to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Then-Demo Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) was a bit more direct: “Frankly I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit that when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.”

As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) notes, “[Democrats] want Trump to lose more than they want the country to win.”

National Review’s Jim Geraghty concurs with a cautionary note: “If the economy goes into recession in 2019, President Trump may well relish having the Democratic-controlled House to blame. It’s unlikely that House Democrats will have much ability to influence U.S. economic policy, other than blocking any new initiatives from the Trump administration. But the timing for them would be pretty bad — they step into the new majority and the economy suddenly slows on their watch.”

But don’t underestimate the current crop of socialist Democrats. Like generations of socialists before them, they are willing to trample grassroots Americans — the ‘Forgotten Man,’ including many of their own constituents — in their relentless pursuit of power, and what they falsely frame as “the greater good.” Indeed, these partisans loathe blue-collar Trump supporters.

On the other hand, don’t underestimate the resolve of President Trump or the American people. Market cycles notwithstanding, I expect that business and consumer confidence will rebound, putting more pressure on Democrats to find other means to take Trump down.

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