By Kelly Sloan | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Kamala Harris finally hinted at something resembling policy on Friday when she revealed snippets of her economic program, and it was every bit as horrifying as one would imagine.
It was essentially a combination of spending sprees, price controls and offers of “free” stuff – meaning paid for by someone else. In other words, it was a prescription for more of the same, only writ large.
Whether she wants it to or not – more pointedly, whether Democratic campaign advisors want it to be or not – Harris’ campaign offers largely a continuation of the Biden administration and its legacy. Which is what, exactly?
Well, domestically that legacy will almost certainly be the inflation that has dominated the economy for the last three-and-a-half years. The Biden administration is responsible for trillions of dollars of new spending, on pretty much everything except border security and defense. The result of all that spending – aside, of course, from a $1.87 trillion spending deficit and an increase in the nation’s (meaning our grandchildren’s) debt up to $35 trillion, which nobody seems terribly concerned about – has been inflation at levels that give the Carter-era’s numbers a run for their money, reaching a nauseating 9.1% in 2022. This amounts to a tax on every single man, woman and child in the country, and is entirely the creation of government; the private sector has not yet figured out how to create systemic inflation.
Harris is trying to have it both ways – on the one hand she is attempting to run from a Biden record that is hugely unpopular, even falling back at regular intervals on the well-used leftist tropes of “making the economy work for all” and “fighting to improve economic conditions for working people” and the like. Why would she have to “improve economic conditions” if the policies she and Biden pushed for the last four years had worked? On the other hand, she is promising to not only continue those policies, but to double-down on them. Essentially, she is promising to start beating the American economy and consumer with a sledgehammer instead of a bat.
J.D. Vance’s quip on Fox News Sunday in which he proffered that giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy was analogous to giving Jeffery Epstein control over human trafficking policy may have been a touch crass, but everyone got the point. A less vulgar comparison might be to suggest that it would be as bad as handing border policy over to … Kamala Harris.
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote a piece on the morning of the DNC kick-off in which he outlined the Harris campaign’s attempt to paint the candidate as a “patriotic progressive”, and the theme of “toughness” they are trying almost desperately to convey. He writes, for instance, that “Harris’ flip-flop on immigration embodies both the toughness and patriotism themes. As a presidential candidate in 2019 — when the left was more influential in the Democratic Party — she favored decriminalizing border crossings. Today, she promises to protect Americans from gangs and fentanyl flowing across the border, and she criticizes Trump for blocking a border-security bill.”
First off, Leonhardt is exhibiting an impressive level of denial in asserting that the left is less influential in the Democratic Party today than it was in 2019. The Democratic Party of 2019 pointedly selected Joseph R. Biden (erroneously as it turned out) as the last best hope for a moderate alternative to the Harris-Sanders-Warren wing. In 2024, the party has embraced both Harris and a leftist running mate.
Second, as to promising to “protect Americans from gangs and fentanyl flowing across the border”, what has she been doing the last three years? The chaotic and dangerous situation at the southern border, which at times nears anarchy, is the other major lasting domestic legacy of Biden-Harris, and this is one which will be even harder for Harris to evade, inasmuch as resolution to the crisis was her assignment.
It’s Biden’s foreign policy legacy, however, that will likely hurt the worst. Pretty much all of the serious international problems consuming the world today – Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, Iran’s aggression through Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Israel, China’s persistent aggression towards Taiwan and the Pacific – was exacerbated, at least indirectly, by Biden’s ignominious and chaotic flight from Afghanistan. That explicit display of American weakness and propensity to abandon allies certainly didn’t deter anything, and provided just enough encouragement to Putin and Iran to pursue the export of violence. The administration added to their problems with late and ineffectual aid to Ukraine and a policy of trying to bully Israel into surrender. All while gutting the defense budget.
As it would with the Biden domestic agenda, a Harris presidency, all indications suggest, would not only fail to correct course, but aggravate the current state of confused ineptitude that passes for foreign policy. Doubling down on fiscal maladroitness will bring lingering economic harm to the country. One despairs at contemplating the consequences of doing so on the international stage.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.