Will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?
In the 30 days since the Democrat election gods swooped down, bumped Joe Biden out of the way, and catapulted Kamala Harris to the top of the 2024 presidential ticket, the ultra-critical question about America’s future seems to have been subsumed by a personality contest. Suddenly, you might think that the election is about candidate likability. Should we back the angry old Donald Trump or the sunny and sprightly Kamala Harris?
So far, the swap has been working for them. Democrats, giddy at their eleventh-hour reprieve from the doomed Biden candidacy, have poured enthusiasm and money into the Harris bandwagon. Polls show that Trump’s once-commanding lead has evaporated.
Although savvy Democrat political operatives are quite comfortable with Harris’s content-free campaign, pressure has been building on their team to demonstrate preparedness to deal with the more pressing issues facing the nation. And so, last week, the new presidential candidate rolled out her plan for dealing with the huge increases in food and housing costs that have been crushing America’s middle class, the Democrats’ primary constituency.
In fairness, presenting that plan was a bold and very important step by the Harris team, providing the electorate with its very first glimpse at how a Harris administration would take on our toughest problems. But also, in fairness, it’s a really bad plan.
Harris’s plan, dubbed the “Opportunity Economy” (a label obviously intended to imply a departure from the much-maligned Bidenomics), includes three main components: a promise to dramatically reduce food costs via government crackdown on price gouging by food suppliers, substantial government financial support to homebuyers, and major increases in tax benefits to offset the cost of childcare.
Reactions to the Harris plan have been mixed, largely along party lines. But in my view, it reveals volumes about Harris’s readiness to serve as our next president.
1.) Kamala Harris either doesn’t understand basic economic principles (a huge liability for a chief executive), or she willfully ignores them. There is universal agreement among economists that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods and services. That’s exactly what happened during our economy’s rebound from COVID — trillions of borrowed or printed dollars pumped into an already booming economy by the American Rescue Plan and the subsequent, absurdly labeled Inflation Reduction Act (which passed through a deadlocked Senate thanks to VP Harris’s tiebreaking vote).
Biden ignored the flashing light warnings of inflation, and so did his vice president.
2.) While it’s always tempting to blame serious problems on something other than your own actions, Harris’s claim that food price inflation was caused by price gouging on the part of greedy corporations is pure nonsense. Supermarket chains face the same inflated costs in running their businesses that their customers face in running their homes. Profit margins in food supply have always been notoriously low, and theirs is a highly competitive business. (I am married to a person who is an expert in that field; like many shoppers, my wife Peggy studies the weekly ads and spreads her food shopping among three nearby supermarket chains to take advantage of the best available prices for each item on her list.)
It is hard to imagine how corporate price gouging could have played any role in the staggering increases in food prices we’ve seen for the past three years. And is it even remotely logical to conclude that the food supply industry suddenly decided to start price gouging the moment Joe Biden became president?
3.) Kamala Harris is obviously one of the true believers in the far-left (socialist) view that it’s the government’s job to grab the reins and override natural, healthy economic forces. Conservatives historically have been in exactly the opposite camp, subscribing to Ronald Reagan’s view that we must get government out of the way and let the free market (capitalism) work its magic. Donald Trump is solidly on that side.
There is not a more compelling example than price controls, the fix Harris prescribes for the high cost of food in America — and a practice that has proved counterproductive anywhere and everywhere it’s ever been tried. A government trying to suppress inflation via price controls has about as much chance of success as modifying gravity by executive order.
4.) Kamala Harris is also very much inclined to throw money (yours and mine) at any problem. In this case, she proposes to give as much as $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, a governmental gift that would provide a welcome boost to some but would hardly be equitable to all, and that would likely benefit homesellers more than homebuyers. That proposal is eerily similar to Biden’s obsession (with full-throated support from his vice president) with spending billions “forgiving” student loans, shifting payment responsibility from those who consciously took on those loans to taxpayers at large. In a Harris administration, stand by for more government largesse targeting favored groups.
On balance, Kamala’s Opportunity Economy won’t make a dent in food prices or new home affordability, and even leftist economists warn it will likely have the opposite effect. But it will add legions of bureaucrats, spend tons of money that we don’t have, and help a few people at the expense of many. It’s a bust.
It remains to be seen whether her foray into economic policy will help or hurt Harris’s election prospects, but she has done the electorate a favor. She showed us the real Kamala Harris – which is pretty much an extension of her last 1,320 days as Joe Biden’s inept sidekick. Vote accordingly.
