Kamala Harris can’t decide whether Democrats’ economic record the past few years is something to build on or something to run from. But she has decided on what she will do if elected: government decrees and government spending.
The second part is probably not a big surprise. Progressives’ solution for inflation, health care, crime, sadness, and the Yankees’ bullpen is government decrees and government spending. It’s all they have.
The economic agenda Harris announced on Friday is the campaign’s first attempt at a policy platform, unless you count her advisers’ telling the press she does not believe the things she said she believed in 2019 when running for president, or in 2020 when serving as a U.S. senator. It doesn’t include a lot of numbers, but where it does, it makes sure to note that the numbers are bigger than Biden’s.
Biden proposed a $20 billion “innovation fund” for housing construction; Harris wants $40 billion. Biden wanted $25,000 in down-payment assistance for people whose parents aren’t homeowners; Harris wants $25,000 for all first-time homebuyers. Biden capped the price of insulin at $35 for seniors; Harris wants it to be $35 for everyone. On top of increasing the child tax credit to $3,600 per child, Harris also wants a $6,000 tax credit for the first year of a child’s life.
The message here is clear: For progressives who thought Biden was too moderate — it beggars belief, but they do exist — a President Harris would kick things up a notch.
Harris wants the Federal Trade Commission to decide what food prices should be. She wants rules to guard against “excessive profits in food and groceries.” As capitalist pigs, we grant that our definition of “excessive” might be different from Harris’s, but the profit margin for grocery stores last year was 1.6 percent. Would she be happier if they lost money?
When Republicans cut the corporate tax for all corporations, taking it from the highest rate in the developed world to the average rate, that was an evil special-interest giveaway, according to Democrats. But when Democrats want to give $90 billion in tax breaks just to the homebuilding industry, as Harris’s proposals do, that’s a “plan to lower housing costs for working families.”
Harris is calling for 3 million new housing units in the next four years. We call for 4 million in the next three years. Your neighbor Rob is calling for 5 million next year. None of us has any idea why those particular numbers make sense, and calling for it is not going to make it happen, but rest assured, it is being called for.
Harris and Biden (who is still the president, at least on paper) made a joint appearance on Thursday to celebrate the administration’s Medicare price negotiations. It says those negotiations will save taxpayers $6 billion (for perspective, Medicare’s projected budgetary shortfall over the next 30 years is $87 trillion). But it won’t say how much prices will come down for people who actually use the drugs, mostly because they likely won’t by much. Harris is doubling down, promising to speed up these negotiations that are doing so little.
The Harris campaign says — and this is a direct quote — that she wants to “cut taxes to help Americans afford health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace.” The Affordable Care Act, ten years on, has still not made care affordable. So, naturally, you’re supposed to vote for the same party that passed it and hope it gives you a tax cut to make up for its failure.
There’s a lot of that kind of argumentation going on in Harris’s agenda. In Democrats’ own telling, the housing market is a disaster, health care is too expensive, food prices are too high, the tax burden is too heavy, and the American economy is characterized by price-fixing plutocrats stealing from the poor. And the way out is to vote for the same person who has been the vice president for the past three and a half years and supported all of the current administration’s policies? Because if given another term, with even more spending, it’ll work out better this time?
Harris clearly thinks Biden’s approach has been the right one. But she also seems to think that the U.S. economy is terrible. And rather than propose anything substantially different, she is running on Bidenomics, but even more so.