For months, I’ve been haranguing Ricochetti about the growing disparity between the jobs numbers reported by the Establishment Survey vs. the Household Survey, pointing to my belief that the headline numbers from the Establishment report were, like the rent, “too damn high.”

Well, well, well.   The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just released a revision to the jobs numbers, and 818,000 of those Establishment report jobs just evaporated. Add those to last year’s downward revision of 307,000 and that means that 1.125 MILLION of those Biden-Harris highly trumpeted jobs were figments of the BLS’s imagination.

This past week, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, put forward an economic plan for the revitalization of the American economy. But the law of unintended consequences means that her plan would do the exact opposite. It is a rare achievement for a major political figure to put forward a childlike plan for economic revival that is deservedly both panned by the Washington Post editorial board as a collection of “populist gimmicks” and ridiculed by the Wall Street Journal as “Venezuelan-style left-wing populism.” For once, left and right unite to denounce this toxic one-two combination: huge restrictions on competitive markets coupled with massive programs of redistribution.

Harris is obviously worried about the high inflation rates that during the darkest Biden period reached a temporary high of close to 9 percent. The upshot was that while the stock market did very well, the labor market did not, such that the country has seen a decline in real wages during the Biden years of about 3.9 percent, compared to a 2.6 percent increase during the first three years of the Trump administration before COVID (and the notorious COVID-era restrictions). There is no great mystery here, for, as countless economists have noted, if more dollars chase fewer goods, inflation results from the confluence of these two major forces. Unwise regulation, such as the effort to force EV vehicles on an economy that can ill bear their cost, and major expenditures, such as President Biden’s programs for student loan forgiveness, for which the Democrats should be grateful that they have been blocked in the courts, further contribute to inflation.