I & I Editorial Board“A blast from a failed socialist past.” “Economically dumb.” “Gimmicks.” “Will drive up prices.” “Not sensible policy.” “Hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is.”
These aren’t the reviews Vice President Kamala Harris was hoping for when she premiered her economic plan. Worse, many of them came from her fans. Which might explain why Democrats are begging Harris to keep the rest of her agenda hidden until after the elections.
The Washington Post editorial board savaged Harris’ plan, saying that: “The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.”
The Post was particularly brutal in its attack on Harris’ half-baked “price gouging” plan against Big Grocery, which the Post said “has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s.”
And Catherine Rampell, who is an economic and political commentator for CNN and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, in addition to writing a column for the Post, said that:
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. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.
On CNN, she also explained that Harris’ proposal to give first-time home buyers $25,000 toward a down payment “is likely just going to get passed along in the form of higher prices.”
The New York Times took pains to be “fair” to Harris, but in the end had to admit that her grocery store price control scheme was lame, ending its review with a quote from Jason Furman, an Obama administration official who is now an economics professor at Harvard, who said “This is not sensible policy” and “there’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
His biggest hope, he said, “is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality.”
Josh Barro, writing in the Atlantic, berated Harris for failing Economics 101 and her “shameless glomming-on to Trump’s pandering to hospitality workers.” The only praise he offered is that her pandering to the ignorance of voters could help her win the election.
When CNN asked Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., what he thought of Harris’ plan his response was “the devil’s in the details.”
That’s not exactly two enthusiastic thumbs up.
Rampell says that Harris already appears to be walking her proposals back. “It was interesting to me that she seems to have toned down some of the rhetoric that her campaign was putting out earlier this week on the price gouging stuff,” she said on CNN.
Then again, it’s entirely clear she understands what she proposed. When a reporter asked her how she’d pay for her giveaways, and what other policies she’d reveal, her answer began:
Sure. Well, I mean, you just look at it in terms of what we are talking about. For example, around children and the child tax credit and extending the EITC. That—it’s at $6,000 for the first year of a child’s life. The return on that investment in terms of what that will do and what it will pay for, will be tremendous. We’ve seen it when we did it the first year of our administration, reduced, we reduced child povracy [sic] by over 50% so that’s a lot of the work.
So it’s not surprising to see a headline like this one on Breitbart: “Democrats Beg Kamala Harris Not to Release Policy Agenda Before Election.” It notes that Harris’ campaign advisers worry that releasing any more policy details “could open the vice president up to criticism from Republicans and members of her party.”
So, Democrats are hoping that Harris can win by taking advantage of voters’ ignorance and the media’s obsequiousness. That sounds like a “threat to democracy” to us.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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Unfortunately, it does not work on the voting public, as more Black voters have moved into her column than were ever in Biden’s and tonight after the Obamas finish, she will have 98% voting for her and by the time Slick Willie finishes on Wednesday night, 100% of live Blacks will be voting for her plus 50% of the deceased.
Buying things sight unseen. Is there any more guaranteed way to be cheated? Democrats are hucksters. Voters beware.