A President Harris economic agenda would be even more radical than Biden’s

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine extended Ohio’s first-in the-nation deadline for ballots to give Democrats until September to nominate their presidential candidate in this year. This solved a technicality regarding the filing date that threatened President Joe Biden’s Buckeye State status on ballots. Yet, Democratic power brokers continue to act as if the Democratic National Committee only has until August 7th to finalize its general election ticket.

Even though Biden’s polling is worse than that of any Democratic presidential candidate – much less an incumbent – against a Republican opponent in the last 20 years, it seems the Democratic Party will ignore the majority who want to replace President Obama in a fall battle against former president Donald Trump, 2024 Republican nominee.

This may partly be due to the elders of the party accepting the inevitable. The DNC, with the worst inflationary crisis in history since Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, and Trump’s dramatic survival of an assassination, may be simply resigning to the fact that disenfranchising their voters by replacing the nominee they selected, only to lose anyway to Trump, may not be worth the risk. The Democratic defeatism stems from the danger of Vice President Kamala’s presidential run.

The only person who could practically replace the sitting president on the ticket is his vice president, as even if convention delegates allowed the party to leapfrog the first female, first black, and first Asian vice president with a different Democrat, only Harris would be legally allowed to inherit the Biden campaign’s quarter-trillion-dollar war chest. The choice of Harris will cement the exodus from the Silicon Valley, and the high-dollar donor classes to the GOP.

Ad

When he served in the Obama administration between 2009-17, President Biden governed to the left of Vice President Biden who was already liberal. A President Harris will likely move her economic agenda further to the left than Vice President Harris. In his desperate attempt to win over the youth vote, Biden is now pushing for a radical rent control cap, which would limit annual rent increases to just 5%. Jason Furman, Obama’s top economic advisor, criticized rent control policies as “disgraceful” and said that they were “as bad as any other policy in his toolkit.” He also said that the Biden plan would make housing shortages worse.

Harris, however, has been a firm believer in macro-malarkey since the start of her congressional career. Harris, a California Senator, endorsed a rent control law in Oregon that was similar to the San Francisco statute which ended up increasing rental rates after housing supplies plummeted. Harris’ proposed Rent Relief Act would provide a tax credit for the tens and millions of renters that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. This unfunded liability would be as effective as Obama’s federalization the student loan system.

While Harris was likely to favor the same green central planning as her boss, during her failed presidential bid in 2020 she pledged support for socializing one fifth of the country’s economy through “Medicare For All”. Harris later pretended to be the opposite, but she was in favor of criminalizing private insurance as a way to take over the healthcare system.

Harris is most egregious for being one of the co-sponsors who drafted the Green New Deal of 2019, which would nationalize not only the healthcare sector but the entire energy industry as well, or almost 30% of the U.S. economic system. According to different estimates, the plan would cost anywhere between $52 billion in 2019 dollars and $93 trillion.

Harris’ career has been marked by a series of flip-flops. She supported a $15 minimum federal wage, even though the median wage was less in some states, she opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and she opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Harris voted to confirm Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. She instead introduced a bill requiring that all central bank positions be filled by a candidate who is racially or ethnically diverse.

Harris’ polling is not much better than Biden when she faces Trump head-to-head. She has historically polled lower than her fellow California Democrats, especially in statewide elections. Her 2020 primary polling was so bad that it forced her to withdraw before Iowa. Her legislative wish list, however, is far from inept. If implemented, it would accelerate Biden’s stagflationary policy into something more Soviet.