The Patriot Post® · 'Komrade Kamala'
Democrats are gathering in Chicago for their national convention this week. That’s good news for them because they can move on after a weekend of withering criticism of Kamala Harris’s supposedly first serious policy address on Friday.
In her remarks about the economy, Harris unveiled “new ideas” that really weren’t new. They go back at least as far as Karl Marx, and they’re policies the Democrat Party has been embracing for decades.
It’s more and more government control over every aspect of our lives, including all business activity, the economy, our healthcare, our schools, energy, etc., etc. Everything that a free human being does in the course of everyday life, Democrats intend to control with overwhelming Big Government.
In every area they seize control of, they demand that you follow their philosophy. Democrats will tell you what kind of car you can drive, what food you can eat, how to cook your food, how to heat your home, how you can defend yourself, etc. It is one big leviathan state.
Watching Harris speak Friday, she came across as someone talking for the first time about something they don’t understand. I doubt she knew the meaning of many of the words she said.
On inflation, the main issue that is killing Democrats, she identified businesses as the cause of inflation. Of course, she did. Harris referred to this as “price gauging” when she meant to say “price gouging.” She suggested that government agencies should be empowered to control prices and prevent them from going up.
That’s known as price controls. They’ve been tried before, and they never work.
So, because Bidenomics (which is now Kamalanomics) has crushed the dreams of millions of Americans and made their economic security worse, Harris’s solution is more government control and more printing of money.
If inflation has priced you out of the housing market, Harris will give you $25,000 for a down payment. If the overregulation of the medical industry has caused a shortage of doctors and nurses, she wants a new law mandating that no one pays more than $2,000 for prescriptions. Sure, that sounds nice, but it will result in fewer life-saving drugs and higher prices.
A nonpartisan budget group estimated that the proposals Harris made just in that one speech would increase the national debt by an additional $1.7 trillion over the next ten years. How is all that extra spending going to be paid for? By increasing taxes on the “wealthy,” of course.
But if you confiscated all the wealth of the richest Americans, it would run the federal government for less than nine months. And then, who are you going to get the money from?
Progressive Pushback
The economic policies Harris advocated in her address were roundly condemned, even by left-wing economists.
Jason Furman, a top economic adviser in the Obama administration, said, “This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality. There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
Liberal columnist and CNN commentator Catherine Rampell blasted Harris’s price control policies as “totally unworkable,” saying, “We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before — Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, et cetera — it leads to shortages, it leads to black markets, and plenty of uncertainty.”
In a column for the Washington Post, Rampell wrote:
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.”
There’s been some attempt at damage control, with Harris campaign operatives saying, “We’re not going to set prices.” Well, who decides what is “price gouging,” and how is that not setting prices?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. If you’re a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet, you were likely never taught real economics, and here comes Harris to help you buy a house. It’s possible that terrible economics is good politics.
By the way, it’s not a stretch to point out Harris’s Marxist leanings. She had a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders. She chose a running mate who has praised Chinese communism. And her father is a Marxist economist.
Dowd & The Democrats
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is very connected with progressive politics and the Democrat Party, which is what makes her latest column so interesting.
Dowd wrote that the backdrop to this week’s Democrat National Convention and the “glorious coronation” of Kamala Harris is the bitterness and resentment festering among Democrat leaders after what Dowd described as the “jaw-dropping putsch” to oust Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, the Hamas wing of the Democrat Party took to the streets of Chicago. Nobody knows whether law enforcement will be able to successfully isolate the convention from the pro-Hamas demonstrators. I believe Chicago officials will do whatever they have to do to keep the fringe extremists away from the convention.
But radical Islamists and their leftist allies have now coined the phrase, “Killer Kamala.” That’s not a nickname any candidate wants.
When I heard the phrase “Killer Kamala,” I wished I had thought of it. I wouldn’t use it in reference to the war in the Middle East, however. I would use it because this convention is the most pro-abortion political convention ever, and she is the most extreme pro-abortion presidential nominee in the history of the United States.
Nearly 100 years ago, a presidential campaign was defined by the phrase, “A chicken in every pot.” Harris and her party want “an abortion in every family.” They promote abortion on demand. They subsidize abortions. They want parents to have no say in whether their minor daughter has an abortion. And they want fewer people.
A Big Win — For Now
We got a big win from the Supreme Court late last week. A majority of the justices rejected an appeal from the Biden/Harris administration to enforce its radical rewrite of Title IX, mandating that schools accommodate boys claiming to be girls. The new rule has been blocked by judicial injunctions in multiple states, while cases challenging the constitutionality of the rule proceed in lower courts.
To be clear, the court gave us a temporary procedural win by declaring that it will not allow this radical rewrite to take effect until the cases challenging the new rule are settled. The vote was 5 to 4. I’m disappointed it wasn’t 6 to 3.
The justices urged lower courts to issue their judgments with “appropriate dispatch” so that the case can get to the Supreme Court for its final ruling.
Impeachable Offenses
The House committees investigating the corruption of the Biden family released a joint report Monday morning. Running nearly 300 pages, the report declares that then-Vice President Joe Biden committed impeachable offenses when he abused his office to enrich his family through foreign influence peddling schemes that raked in $27 million.
Moreover, the report states that, as president, Joe Biden obstructed justice by stonewalling the congressional investigation and by providing his son, Hunter, with special treatment from the Justice Department.
It would have been more helpful if this report had been released six weeks ago or a year ago. It remains to be seen how much of an impact, if any, it will have now.
Tune In To Family Talk
Please tune in to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk radio show. On today’s broadcast, I discuss the current state of America with John Stemberger, president of Liberty Counsel Action. Be encouraged as John and I urge Christian citizens to fight for our religious freedoms, the sanctity of human life, and the family!
You can find station listings here. Or you can listen online here.