Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, led by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his soon to be Party-anointed (not voter-selected) heir, Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, insist that our economy is going like gang busters, inflation is down, and on and on. After all, they shout,

The stock market is soaring, household wealth is at record levels, and investment income has never been greater.

And yet,

…some families’ pandemic-era savings are running dry, and delinquencies on credit card and auto-loan payments have jumped.

Thus, I have questions. No show of hands, the questions are intensely individual and personal, and so are your answers. Just think your answers; talk among yourselves, if you wish.

1. Is what you’re paying for groceries today more or less than what you paid just a few years ago, pre-pandemic? Has your take home pay kept up with that, or are you paying a bigger chunk of your take home for those groceries?
2. Is what you’re paying today for gasoline or diesel for your personal cars and trucks more or less than what you paid before? Has your take home pay kept up with that, or are you paying a bigger chunk of your take home for these?
3. Is what you’re paying today for electricity or natural gas to heat or cool your homes or to cook those expensive groceries more or less than what you paid before? Has your take home pay kept up with that, or are you paying a bigger chunk of your take home for these?
4. Are you eating out less than you used to?
5. Are you able to keep your credit card paid off every month or your balance stable from month to month, or is or is your balance growing?
6. Are you able to put as much, or any, money into savings or a rainy day pile as you were before?
7. Are you able to put as much money into your employer’s 401(k) program, if he has one, or into your IRA as you were before?

You can think of other things on which you spend or would like to spend (a home, perhaps, or a slightly bigger one to accommodate your growing family or the one you’d like to start) that are more expensive today than before, especially as compared to your take home pay.

Those Party politicians are not talking to you when they talk about how wonderful the economy they’ve constructed these last 3+ years is and how much they want to do even more over the next 4 years. They don’t care about you; they don’t even notice you exist.

The other party will address these problems directly. At the core of its economic plans is bringing down the cost of energy. Energy lies at the heart of everything we produce for sale and wish to buy, from energy for production, through transport to points of sale, through those sales. To get at the cost of energy, that other party will get regulatory blocks to production greatly reduced, and it will encourage increased drilling for oil and natural gas, as well as construction of nuclear power plants.

Worried about atmospheric CO2 production from increased oil and natural gas drilling? Keep in mind that CO2 from American hydrocarbon production and use is already at world lows, per capita; our technology keeps CO2 emissions at a minimum. The CO2 emitters are Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and India. Nuclear power plants produce no CO2 emissions in their operation, and very little in their construction.

The answer to those seven questions and to your additional ones will be much more favorable with Party’s Big Government-is-the-answer politicians no longer in a position where their ignoring you matters.

Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator for The Wall Street Journal, thinks the Federal Reserve should cut its benchmark interest rates sooner rather than later. After all, he says, inflation is down to 2.6% and the unemployment rate stands at 4.1%.

I disagree. Ip makes much of the rate of inflation drop, from 4.3% then to an estimated 2.6% now, the steepest decline since 1984, and of the unemployment rate increase, to 4.1% from 3.6%, an increase seldom seen outside recessions.

Not so much. The inflation rate drop also is from its 9+% peak a couple years ago, and as Ip put it, the current rate is within shouting distance of the Fed’s goal of 2%. That much Ip has right; the difference now is economic noise. Regarding unemployment, 3.6% is historically consistent with a hot, inflationary labor market while 4.1% is historically consistent with a healthy economy. The rate of increase bears watching, but it doesn’t warrant action.

In fact, nothing in Ip’s article data warrant Fed action. The Fed’s current benchmark interest rates, between 5.25% and 5.5%, are entirely consistent, historically, with 2% inflation and 4-ish% unemployment. Actual economic fluctuations around those targets are normal and self-correcting.

Rather than cutting rates further, or dithering about when to cut—or to increase, an option the Fed also still is mumbling about—Powell and his Governors should stop the hand-wringing, and announce that they’re going to leave the rates alone for the foreseeable future because the economy has arrived. No further movement, in either direction, in the benchmarks is warranted.

The People’s Republic of China’s debt-fueled economic growth is threatening to hinder continued growth, even to cause serious contraction for the PRC’s economy. Much of that debt is local government off-the-books lending and, especially,

The deterioration of China’s real-estate market in the past three years meant local governments could no longer rely on land sales to real-estate developers, a significant source of revenue.

There’s another problem with that last, though, that makes off-the-books debt issuance even dicier for those local jurisdictions. The local governments own, or owned, only a finite amount of land, and so there is an upper bound to the amount they can sell to those developers. It’s very much akin to feudal Europe, where parents, over a very few generations would subdivide their land to give some to their eldest sons to use and profit from—and then ran out of land to subdivide. It was worse for the kings, who gave away royal lands to eldest sons and to nobles as rewards or loyalty purchases. The kings ran out of land, also.

Kings and local PRC governments could repossess those lands on one or another pretext, but such moves were, and are for the PRC governments, fraught with political danger. In the PRC’s case, the land limits, as much as any market for real estate, meant that borrowing against that collateral becomes even more risky, as the land collateral becomes smaller, along with the constructed buildings becoming expensive to hold on inventory pending sales that aren’t happening.