Harris economic plan rebrands Democrats’ old playbook of more federal spending, regulations, and destructive tax policies. (Commentary)
By S.T. Karnick
Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris outlined her “Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families” in a widely anticipated speech in Raleigh, North Carolina last Friday. Far from being an agenda, with actual costs and benefits specified, Harris’s plan is a slapdash assortment of ideas for even greater interference in the economy by the people who broke it in the first place.
Harris’s program does have a consistent theme: she will create an “opportunity economy” by “building up our middle class” and lowering costs of housing, health care, and groceries. That echoes the rhetoric Harris and President Joe Biden have continually used to camouflage their destructive, big-government, antibusiness policies.
The Democrat Party has a multidecade history of thwarting opportunity and the “middle class” and causing inflation and other economic destruction. Harris’s announced program merely rebrands the Democrats’ system of interest group payoffs and is in no way a positive, organized plan for rebuilding the bourgeoisie.
Shamelessly stretching a sheepskin over the rabid wolf that is Democrat governance, Harris butters up the normies with repeated mentions of “families,” the “middle class,” “children,” “workers” and “hardworking Americans.” She rebrands Democrat interest-group politics as an appeal to the middle-income taxpayers to whom she and the Democrats have been sticking it for decades, attempting to replay the successful strategy of Bill Clinton’s 1990s presidential campaigns.
Harris is no Bill Clinton. Harris was the farthest-left U.S. senator of her time, out-communizing even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) (which few would have thought possible), and then the vice president of a Potemkin presidency that may be the farthest-left in history. Her instincts are all for big government and Democrat interest-group pandering.
Harris is slathering phony populist rhetoric thickly on good old-fashioned Democrat vote-buying. Harris says, for example, that she wants to restore the COVID-era expanded child tax credit of up to $3,600 per child per year and boost that to $6,000 for children in their first year. Tax cuts are always good, though limiting them to favored groups of people is a hoary Democrat tactic that suppresses economic expansion and feeds inflation by directing money toward consumption instead of investment.
The same is true of Harris’s promise to cut the costs of health care and prescription drugs. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars per year and a strangling morass of regulations have ruined the nation’s health care system. Adding to that mess will only increase the harm.
Addressing one of the most egregious outcomes of the Biden-Harris administration (and the list is so long!), Harris makes a big point of attacking alleged corporate price gouging on food and prescription drugs. She proposes to fight inflation with “a federal ban on price gouging that would push the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to investigate how corporations exploit consumers by raising prices for profit,” Raleigh TV station CBS-17 reported.
That certainly will do nothing to end inflation, which has basically stopped already anyway. Punishing some businesses and economic sectors for raising prices will not halt a general increase in prices. The money will flow to other places in the economy, artificially inflating those prices instead. Overall inflation will stay the same.
In fact, valiantly fighting alleged price gouging “for the middle class and hardworking Americans” will only induce a further misallocation of assets economywide by distorting price signals even more, adding to the countless inefficiencies the government already imposes on the economy, including via inflation itself.
The fight against price gouging will be another way that Democrat-left economic policies reduce the standard of living “for the middle class and hardworking Americans” for whom Harris expresses such concern.
In addition, price gouging is already illegal. If there are real, serious cases of price gouging in the United States, their existence is another item on the lengthy list of failures by the Biden-Harris administration. Far from being a brilliant policy idea, the Harris plan is an admission of failure. Too bad that the captive press will not acknowledge that simple truth.
There is in fact no price gouging problem. As Unleash Prosperity comments, “ace economist EJ Antoni has noted that producer prices have risen at almost the precise rate that consumer prices have risen.” The figures clearly show that the increases in the consumer price index have been driven by increases in producer prices, not profits. With producers having to pay more for inputs such as fuel, materials, and labor, they must charge more for their products and services.
Profit margins for grocery chains have always been very low, and they have fallen drastically under Biden-Harris—now at a measly 1.2 percent.
Grocery chains are not cheating. They are barely surviving.
Consumer prices across the economy rose for the same reason producer prices increased: generalized inflation caused by the Federal Reserve having to monetize the Biden-Harris administration’s surreal increase in federal debt. The annual deficit was below $1 trillion per year before COVID-19. That was far too much. It is now $2 trillion per year and will continue to rise even without Harris’s nutty plans for more spending.
Prices are much higher than they were three years ago. Real, after-tax personal income has decreased. People are struggling to pay their bills. Government is spending irrationally and regulating without regard for costs and benefits, adding to the burden on the hardworking Americans Harris claims to champion.
Harris wages war only for big government. She is replaying previous Democrats’ cunningly euphemized antibusiness stance and reusing their badly mildewed populist rhetoric to disguise the socialist design behind her plans. The inevitable result of her policies would be more misery and even-phonier rhetoric.
S. T. Karnick is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.
Originally published by American Thinker. Republished with permission.
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