Kamala Harris’s Gold Necklace

News that the value of the greenback has hit yet another record low gives us the chance to write about Vice President Kamala Harris’ gold necklace. Various accounts on the Web reckon it’s from Tiffany’s. It’s modest and tasteful and is supposedly priced at $62,000.* That is being mocked — in coarse terms — on the internet by Senator Vance, though women have, for good reason, been coming into possession of elegant jewelry since before Cleopatra.Our reaction is different from Mr. Vance’s, particularly since the value of the dollar has just collapsed to below a 2,500th of an ounce of gold. Given the trend all these years, it looks to us like the gold necklace might have been a shrewd investment by Mrs. Harris — or one of her admirers. If it was purchased on the day that, say, President George W. Bush was sworn in as president, the gain would have been nearly tenfold just on the necklace’s gold.“This is the epitome of what the ‘elites’ in DC have been doing to families like yours and mine for decades,” Mr. Vance says. Wait a minute, though. President Trump’s running mate is the one campaigning for office on the platform of a weak dollar. Neither Trump, nor Mr. Vance, nor, for that matter, Ms. Harris, not to mention Master Sergeant Tim Walz — not one of them has been campaigning for a stable dollar defined in terms of gold.No, the whole lot of our politicians in this race seems content to let the Federal Reserve run down — debase, technically — the value of the American dollar that we all use for our daily commerce. The Biden-Harris administration has been particularly reckless in respect of this. Yet they are hardly alone. The last presidents who left us with a dollar that was more valuable than when they took office were Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton.Under Reagan, the value of the dollar, measured in gold, soared 38.8 percent. Under G.H.W. Bush, 23.1 percent, and under Mr. Clinton, 24.2 percent. Then came President George W. Bush, and the Global War on Terror. The dollar began its long decline, shedding 68.9 percent of its value in gold. The Obama dollar collapsed 28.9 percent, and with Trump it fell another 35.7 percent. Under President Biden, it’s lost 26.4 percent — so far.We mention all this to, among other things, mark that this is a bipartisan issue — a measure of the decline and unhappiness of our nation. It might seem like an abstruse matter. Americans, though, aren’t dumb. We love the story about Jeb Hensarling, who chaired the Financial Services in the House, and walked into a 7-Eleven in Texas to buy a quart of milk. When he remarked to the cashier on the high price, she launched into a furious critique — of Janet Yellen.We’d have thought that someone in this campaign would have picked up on the issue of the dollar, which is still being inflated at the rate that’s 50 percent higher than the Fed supposedly wants. Since Bretton Woods, the dollar has shed more than 99 percent of its value. Who is prepared to address this on the stump? The scandal here is not the price of Kamala Harris’ necklace. It’s the collapse in the value of the dollar being palmed off as a good thing. ________* Snopes.com, a fact-checker, was saying, on our deadline, that its research is in progress on this head.

Kamala Harris’s Gold Necklace

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