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What if both candidates are wrong?

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) represents much of Orange County, once one of California’s most Republican areas.

This year her GOP opponent is Scott Baugh, a former Orange County party chairman who served a relatively brief stint in California’s legislature over 20 years ago. She easily beat him in their head-to-head primary matchup, and is favored to win in November.

Even so, NBC News calls the district “a key swing district,” apparently because of Orange County’s Republican past and a popular belief in the news media that a voter backlash against Democrats is brewing nationwide. (See their story here.)

Porter (bio here) came from an affluent Iowa family, and is a Yale and Harvard-educated lawyer. Republican critics are trying to portray her as “rich” (see, e.g., website here), and Baugh is complaining that she’s outspending him. Baugh (bio here) also is a lawyer, but with less impressive credentials.

Let me elaborate on the wealth issue, even though it’s irrelevant to the point of this article. That website claims she’s “rich” based on her congressional salary of $174,000 a year and their estimate of her net worth as $600,000 to $2.2 million (after subtracting mortgage debt). That’s not wealthy by Orange County standards, and that income is less than it seems, considering she has to maintain homes in two of America’s most expensive places. Nor does Porter have a wealthy husband. She isn’t married. She’s a domestic abuse survivor and single mother of three minor children.

Now to the point I’m writing about here.

NBC News says the Republican strategy is to make the election a referendum on “an unpopular president and rising prices.” Fair enough; parties and candidates strategize. They talk about issues that concern voters, and offer plans they believe will appeal to voters. Those “solutions” often defy reality and reason, which is why political insiders call elections “the silly season.”

Inflation is a big issue in this election. “To lower prices, Baugh [says] lawmakers should boost the supply of goods, ‘quit spending so much money’ and balance the budget.” Boost the supply of goods how? Is that government’s function? It also ignores that inflation is moderating in the goods sector, and the inflation problem now is concentrated in services, because that’s where consumers are spending now. He didn’t even mention the Federal Reserve; and if he wants to blame it on spending, is he prepared to tell consumers and business owners the pandemic relief checks doled out to them were a bad idea? To balance the budget, Congress has to raise taxes, cut spending, or do both. Republicans are against taxes, and never say what spending they want to cut (but rest assured it’s not their pet sending projects).

Beyond that issue, he wants to “reform entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare, which he says have too many “unfunded liabilities.” Meaning what? He says raising the retirement age should be “one of the tools you have to use.” But that’s problematical for older workers who can’t keep working for health or other reasons. What else? For most retirees, Social Security and Medicare are vital and some have little else, so be wary of “solutions” that involve cutting benefits. And most Republicans want to privatize those programs, which would enrich Wall Street at the expense of retirees.

Now let’s consider Porter’s statements. “The answer to rising costs, Porter said, is … empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices, invest in U.S. [chip] manufacturing …  and fight ‘price gouging, including by big oil companies.’” The first two are desirable policies for other reasons, but won’t bring inflation down from 9% to 2%, and vilifying oil companies won’t increase oil supply or reduce gasoline demand. Some Democrats do have a plan, of sorts, to deal with high gas prices: Taxing oil profits. That will get us less gasoline (see my previous article here). Porter wasn’t explicit that she supports this scheme, but sort of whistled that maybe she does.

The bottom line is neither of these candidates is saying anything realistic about inflation.

Inflation is partly due to de-globalization. Do we want to depend on China again? Also partly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Do we want to give Putin Ukraine, and whatever else he decides to take next? I’d guess the candidates don’t advocate either of those things. But this inflation is primarily due to Federal Reserve policies, and reversing it requires undoing the policies that created it. Nobody will like higher house and car payments, higher interest on credit cards, and tighter lending by banks that makes it harder to buy stuff; or the fact it typically takes a recession and job losses to put hot inflation on cold ice.

Political candidates understandably don’t want to talk about that, so they skirt around the issue, and play to what they think their voter bases want to hear. Who do you vote for, when neither candidate appears to know what they’re talking about? This question isn’t limited to that district, but is more or less a universal problem for voters everywhere. My answer: You try to pick the one who seems to be least wrong.

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