The Hill:

Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson pushed back against what she described as a false narrative surrounding her, insisting that she is not a “wacky new-age nutcase.”

“The establishment media sees me as a real threat to the status quo,” Williamson told Hill.TV during an interview that aired on Tuesday.

“People are so invested in creating this false narrative about me as the ‘crystal lady,’ ‘wacky new-age nutcase.’ If you really think about it, I must be doing something right that they’re so scared,” she added.

Williamson, a self-help author and spiritual advisor to Oprah Winfrey, insisted that the U.S. doesn’t need another traditional candidate who will push incremental change, arguing that the current economic system is fundamentally broken.

“People say our system is broken — it’s not just broken, it’s corrupt to the core. It’s not just that our economy isn’t working for everyone, it’s that our economy has become completely taken over by corporate forces,” she said.

Williamson also said that one way to fix America and defeat President Trump is through a “spiritual awakening.”

“This president is not just a politician — this president is a phenomenon and an insider politics game will not defeat him,” she said. “The only thing that will defeat this phenomenon is another phenomenon and the phenomenon that will defeat him is a spiritual awakening in this country.” …

Williamson didn’t speak much during the first Democratic debate last month, but when she did, she captured the attention of Twitter, inspiring an onslaught of jokes and memes. She was also one of the most searched-for candidates on Google during the debate.

Leading up to the second round of debates, the self-help guru said she hopes to be taken more seriously by the public, noting that voters take a candidate’s character into consideration as well as their policies.

“I want the American people to see who I am as a woman — I think people are watching not only for what your policies are, but who you are,” she said.

I don’t know about the “New Age” part, but Madison Dibble provides evidence about the “wacky” “nutcase” part:

Spiritual advisor turned presidential candidate Marianne Williamson called for Americans to invest between $200 and $500 billion in reparations for slavery in the United States.

During the second round of presidential debates Tuesday night on CNN, Williamson — who was a longtime spiritual advisor to Oprah Winfrey — laid out her vision and reasoning behind her support for racial reparations in the United States.

The debate on reparations has taken many forms. Some candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), support the development of a federally-funded commission to study the financial implications of slavery on black Americans. Others, like Williamson, support cash payments to black Americans to address the financial fallout from slavery and the Jim Crow era.

While O’Rourke offered vague support for a reparations bill, Williamson had already done the math on exactly how much Americans should pay to “cure” the pain of slavery that exists today.“It’s not $500 billion in financial assistance. It’s $500 billion — 200 to 500 billion dollars — payment of a debt that is owed. That is what reparations is. We need some deep truth-telling when it comes. We don’t need another commission to look at [the] evidence. I appreciate what Congressman O’Rourke has said. It is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal. All that a country is a collection of people. People heal when there’s deep truth-telling. We need to recognize when it comes to the economic gap between blacks and whites in America, it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has had to do with the fact that there was 250 years of slavery followed by another hundred years of domestic terrorism.”

Williamson noted that, at the close of the Civil War, many newly freed black Americans requested 40 acres and a mule be distributed to each former slave as a payment for the atrocities of slavery. She added that, in today’s dollars, that would be a total investment of more than $1 trillion to be paid to black Americans.

“If you did the math today, it would be trillions of dollars, and I believe that anything less than a hundred billion dollars is an insult and I believe the 200 to 500 billion is politically feasible today because so many Americans realize there is an injustice that continues to form a toxicity underneath the surface, an emotional turbulence that only reparations will heal.”

Her statements on reparations earned one of the loudest applause of the evening.

Here’s some truth-telling, Marianne. At least 360,000 Americans — 12,216 from Wisconsin — died in the Civil War to end slavery. Williamson’s stupid proposal (and similar proposals from other Democrats) are an insult to their memory.

Jonathan V. Last watched last night’s Democratic presidential debate so we didn’t have to:

Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Detroit was, amazingly enough, an illuminating event as six candidates laid out—very clearly—the two pathways open to the party in this cycle.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made the case for one of those options: A radical change in America’s economic compact. Sanders and Warren advocated for universal healthcare with private insurance outlawed. They argued for free college tuition. They said that illegal migration should be decriminalized and that all immigrants, documented and undocumented, should get universal healthcare. And that private sector companies should be viewed as “sucking” money out of the economy.

Sanders and Warren are currently polling at a combined 30 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.

On the other side, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, and John Hickenlooper argued that universal coverage was a laudable goal, but that outlawing private health insurance was bad policy, financially foolish, and politically suicidal. They insisted that immigration laws should be enforced because functionally open-borders would incentivize more uncontrolled migration. They proposed that the private sector was a source of innovation that could be leveraged to solve a number of America’s problems.

Delaney, Bullock, Ryan, and Hickenlooper are currently polling at a combined 2.0 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.

Over the course of three hours, these two sides went after one another in a sustained and open manner. (And four other Democrats more or less did their own thing.)

How do we decide who “won” the first Detroit debate? That’s tough. You’re probably going to think that the winner was the side whose politics is closest to your own. (This is not a criticism.)

But I’m going to try to put my own priors aside and rank the candidates on the merits, which is to say: On how they did relative to what they’re trying to accomplish.

1. John Delaney: He’s running to be the Democratic nominee for president and he opened by telling the audience, “I was the youngest CEO in the history of the New York Stock exchange.”

Wait what?

Honestly, I couldn’t tell if this was naivete or the greatest troll job since Cocaine Mitch’s thanks-for-playing meme.

But Delaney did what he wanted to do: Establish himself as the most substantive critic of the progressive agenda being advanced by Sanders and Warren.

He stood up for the idea that “The Green New Deal is about as realistic as Trump saying Mexico is going to pay for the wall.” And then he listed four or five distinct policy ideas to deal with climate change, including a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

He made the case for Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership—a policy that has currently been abandoned by both parties.

And on the subject of single-payer healthcare, he was basically the honey badger.

Delaney explained that Medicare does not actually cover the cost of healthcare—Medicare covers 80 percent of costs while private insurers cover 120 percent. He predicted that if America does away with private health insurance, we’ll get a two-tiered system where there is elite healthcare for rich people who can pay with cash—nd then everyone else, who has to make do with whatever the government gives them.

Explaining the insanity of proposing to eliminate private insurance, Delaney said, “When we created Social Security, we didn’t make pensions illegal.”

Brutality.

Toward the end of one of his exchanges with the progressives, Delaney quipped, “I’m starting to think this is not about healthcare, but this is some anti-private sector thing.”

You don’t say . . .

So here’s the thing about Delaney: He’s not running to be the nominee. He’s running to save his party from a 2020 loss.

Delaney delivered his message as well as it could be said. The question is whether or not Democratic voters have any interest in hearing it.

2. Bernie Sanders: I’ve been saying for months that no one is going to outbid Sanders on socialism. On Tuesday night he asserted his dominance.

Bernie’s superpower is his ability to shamelessly—and literally—wave away any critiques. Over and over, all night long, one of the non-progs would pick at some unworkable element of his plans and Sanders would thrust his hands in the air and do that muppet thing with them and shout “He’s wrong!”

Or “Your question is a Republican talking point!”

Or “I do know, I wrote the damn bill!”

Always in a shout, always with an exclamation point at the end. And it works for him.

Unlike Warren, Sanders avoided getting drawn into policy questions and stayed at a high altitude. Which was good, since Warren’s answers were . . . not great.

Bernie came to Detroit with one goal: To differentiate himself from Warren without having to attack her. To my eyes, he nailed this.

3. Pete Buttigieg: Mayor Pete’s whole thing is that he doesn’t fit into your progressive-moderate dichotomy. He’s a fresh face! Just wants to solve problems with the best ideas! The choice of a new generation!

But without saying so, he very subtly signaled that if you’re looking for a Big Change Progressive . . . well, he’s available.

He spent a very disconcerting couple of minutes talking about the need for “structural changes” that would have to be made to the Constitution in order to deal with Citizens United and end the Electoral College and turn the District of Columbia into a state and pack the Supreme Court and just kind of assumed that constitutional amendments are something America has done before and can do again.

Having a 37-year-old mayor insist that, obviously, we should pass three or four amendments to the Constitution, as if this was all NBD, is suboptimal because it suggests that all of his pragmatic pablum might simply be a mask.

Speaking of which, the other moment that stuck out for me was one of his answers about single-payer. Mayor Pete says that his plan is “Medicare for All Who Want It,” but that he believes that people will just love Medicare and no one will keep their private insurance and eventually private insurance will simply wither away without the government having to kill it.

That’s a sign of someone desperately trying to have it both ways: Don’t worry, I’m totes pragmatic. But, you know, not really.

All of that aside, he’s so thoughtful and well-spoken that he’s clearly a top-tier talent. And he’s the only person on stage to vocalize a fundamental truth: “Ask yourself how someone like Donald Trump even gets within cheating distance of the Oval Office in the first place. It doesn’t happen unless America is already in a crisis.”

True that.

4. John Hickenlooper: Like Delaney, he’s not really running for president. He’s running for Secretary of the Interior or some such.

But credit him for this: He made three excellent points.

First, that Democrats didn’t win big in 2018 by being like Sanders and Warren.

Second, that you if pick your progressive battles, you can get real wins. For instance, in Colorado, he beat the NRA, but didn’t build massive government expansions.

Third, as Bernie was doing his Crazy Bernie hand waving, Hickenlooper blurted out sarcastically, “Throw your hands up.”

This was a dagger. And while it didn’t leave a mark in Detroit, someone heavier is going to use it against Bernie down the line. Take that to the bank.

5. Marianne Williamson: She got just the right amount of time—enough to make an impression, but not enough to expose her as being kind of kooky. Like when she talked about a $250 billion to $500 billion reparations package. Or the “dark psychic force.”

She’s a weird bundle of conviction politician and motivational speaker and Shirley MacLaine. And I’m pretty convinced that if this was a normal-sized Democratic field with only seven candidates in it, she’d be somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.

6. Tim Ryan and Steve Bullock (tie): Neither of them moved the needle in the way they needed to. But both made reasonable criticisms of the progressive agenda. If there is a market for this in the primaries, someone else will pick up what they’re laying down.

8. Elizabeth Warren: I’m not prepared to call it a terrible night for her. But it wasn’t good.

Warren could not differentiate herself from Sanders. And she had no good answer for the criticisms of Delaney et al.

For example, when Delaney talked about what a terrible idea getting rid of private health insurance was, at first she balked. Then she complained that Democrats shouldn’t be using Republican talking points about taking things away from people.

(As if that would be a sufficient answer in a general election.)

But then, when she finally got warmed up, she went even further to the left, explaining that the real problem with private health insurance was that the profit motive is incompatible with the health insurance sector. And that “These insurance companies do not have a God-given right to make $23 billion in profits and suck it out of our healthcare system.”

I am—how to put this delicately?—very much the target audience for Warren’s brand of anti-corporate progressivism. And even I thought to myself, “Hold on there, comrade. Are we sure we want to seize the means of production for healthcare?”

And Warren’s stock answer for all political and practical objections—that they might have unintended consequences, that they were likely to repel voters, that they would be nigh on impossible to implement—were met with one of two counterarguments:

Either, “Oh that’s just a Republican talking point.” (Which is what she said to Hickenlooper after he took apart the Green New Deal as a serious policy idea.)

Or, “[W]e can’t choose a candidate we don’t believe in just because we’re too scared to do anything else.” (Which is what she said when asked if she was worried about being seen as a radical socialist, like Sanders.)

Those are not compelling answers. In a general election they would be very risky answers. Though it’s possible they will resonate with Democratic primary voters.

9. Amy Klobuchar: If she had charged into the fight with Delaney and the other anti-progressives, she might have seized the night. As it was, she mostly laid back and then, weirdly, tried to talk about how tough she is. (“I was called a street fighter from the iron range by my opponent. And when she said it, I said thank you.”)

Daniel Horowitz:

With the unemployment rate below 4 percent for 16 consecutive months, one would expect economic growth to be soaring. Yet even as we experience the best job market since the late 1960s, this is the first time in modern history that we have not experienced a year of 3 percent GDP growth. What gives?

Earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the economy had grown just 2.1 percent during the second quarter of this year (ending June 30). It also revised Q4 of 2018 down to just 1.1 percent, which now means that growth during the 12 months ending Q4 of 2018 was only 2.5 percent, not 3 percent as previously thought. This means that the U.S. economy has now gone 14 years without a year-over-year growth of 3 percent.  It’s been 19 years since we’ve hit 4 percent, which was during 1997-2000.

While the numbers don’t portend a coming recession, it is highly unusual for us to go for 16 consecutive months with unemployment below 4 percent and 43 months below 5 percent, yet never attain 3 or 4 percent annual GDP growth. In fact, that has never happened before. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate ranged from 5.3 percent to 3.9 percent – not even as good as today’s 3.7 percent – yet GDP growth was over 4 percent. Ditto for the late 1960s, when we saw years of 6 percent growth. During the mid 1980s, we saw this growth even with higher unemployment rates.

The debt is not just a problem for future generations in terms of a fiscal cost that will be borne by taxpayers. The exclusive focus on the future is what has fostered the Louis XV mentality of “after me, the deluge.” Let’s face it, we are a nation that doesn’t care about the future of our children. What is missing from the discussion is that the debt is permanently weighing down economic growth now.

Let’s peek into the numbers behind today’s topline GDP report. GDP comprises personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, government spending, and net exports. Seventy percent of the equation is consumption, and the robust 4.3 percent growth in consumption this quarter is a big part of what is keeping us even at 2.1 percent growth. This is not artificial and is good news. Consumption is a sign of a healthy job market, with more people earning money, as well as the tax cuts putting more cash in people’s pockets to spend. No matter whether our economy is fully free market or quasi-socialist, whenever there is more money in people’s pockets, these numbers will go up. We are now in a boom period, and the numbers are good.

But what else is propping up the number? Government spending! Gross government spending, which accounts for about 17.5 percent of the GDP pie, spiked 5 percent. Non-defense spending rose by 15.9 percent!

Thus, without the spending binge, which will be accelerated by the budget betrayal promoted by the president and backed by more Democrats than Republicans in the House, the topline number would have been lower.

But here’s the problem. While government spending juices up the economy in the short run, the debt that we must incur to continue that spending is permanently weighing down the economy in the long run.

Which leads us to the third component – gross private domestic investment. That is the engine of a supply side economy. Those numbers contracted by 5.5 percent this past quarter, the worst showing since 2015. Investment in non-residential structures plummeted by 10.8 percent, highly unusual with such a good job market.

Then, of course, there is the final component: exports. Net exports were down 5.2 percent because of the tariffs.

Here’s the reality: Our economy is nothing like it was in the 1980s or 1990s. We have a huge misallocation of resources, with all sorts of capital going into government-mandated schemes that increase dependency programs or debt, rather than the most efficient investments.

Then the debt itself is hurting us. So much money is now spent on paying off interest. As interest rates are pushed higher, more private money is used to purchase higher-interest Treasury securities rather than invest in capital goods, such as factories and plants. The more government is desperate to service this debt, the more it will drive up interest rates, which in turn will divert and misallocate more investors into Treasury bonds. This further makes interest on the debt even more expensive, constantly reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle of debt and higher rates.

At some point over the past decade, we crossed the Rubicon of irrevocable lethargic growth because of debt. Interest on the debt is the fastest-growing expenditure of government. That is a problem now. So, we can create jobs and wages even in a centrally planned economy, but the debt and market distortions are creating so much inefficiency and waste that they are permanently capping our growth. I don’t believe we will ever achieve protracted 3 percent growth until the debt crisis is solved.

The president has been convinced that we can grow our way out of the debt. The problem is the debt itself is weighing us down from growing!

With two months left until the budget deadline, the president could have spent the entire summer recess building the case for a better debt deal. Instead, he chose to support a bill nearly unanimously supported by House Democrats that will add almost $2 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years.

If Trump wants to be the president of growth, he can’t have it both ways and be the president of debt.

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