The Treasury Secretary is such a kiss-ass and knows damn well that the Fed's so-called full employment mandate was a set of handcuffs put on the Fed in 1978

And why did the Congress do that to the Fed?

So the Congress could evade responsibility for high unemployment as well as for high inflation, that's why.

A bunch of cowards six ways to Sunday they are.

Besides, core personal consumption expenditures is the Fed's key metric, as everyone knows, and that is an inflation metric, not an employment metric. 

And The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act specifically recognizes that reducing inflation is the Fed's main job, actually mandating ZERO inflation, not 2% inflation as widely misinterpreted. 

Meanwhile there is another report of employment besides the total non-farm payrolls report which the Fed can consult, and it shows employment continues near all-time highs in July.

No change to DFF was the appropriate response of the Fed to persistent core inflation way above 2%.  

 

Bessent: How Can The Fed Set Rates When Jobs Data Is This Broken? "This Was A Five Standard Deviation Mistake"

 

 

 

 

 

But of course it's not too late for Joe Biden to drop out

 

It's Too Late for Democrats To Switch Out Biden

Jonathan Martin, Politico

 

LBJ announced he wouldn't run on Mar 31, 1968. Humphrey announced he would on Apr 27.

 

Full Employment Is A Socialist Myth: Socialism Needs Liberalism In Order To Grow

So-called conservatives who believe in full employment rightly deserve contempt. Full employment is a utopian concept. What better way to invalidate "capitalism" than to charge it with an impossible task, and then ridicule it endlessly for its failure to do what it never promised?

That the US Federal Reserve has been bullied into accepting full employment as one of its mandates is reason enough to shut it down.

Ron Radosh here:

America’s preeminent socialist leader in the 1980s was the late Michael Harrington, who carried on as the spokesman for social democracy, a post he inherited from his predecessors, Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. Harrington was well-aware that the path to socialism, in which he ardently believed, was through continued extension of the American welfare state. He became a vigorous supporter of a meaningless bill passed by Congress in 1978 called the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which stated that it was the policy of the United States to strive to attain a full employment economy.

Testifying before Congress in defense of the act, the dying Senator Humphrey asked Harrington: “Is my bill socialism?” The socialist leader responded, “It isn’t half that good.” His point was that socialism needed liberalism as a focal point from which to grow. As Harrington argued at the time, by laying out the principle that it was the duty of the state to create full employment, socialists could build upon that to move liberal supporters to advocate more extensive social-democratic programs that would challenge the hegemony of capitalist social relations, making it easier to advance real socialist measures at a future moment.