Kamala Harris Is Politically More Extreme and Would Waste More Taxpayer Money

Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him. That means that America may soon have its most left-wing president ever. Harris wants to increase government spending even faster than Joe Biden. Harris supports spending trillions of dollars on race-based reparations, which Biden hedged on. That would be bad for the economy — foreign countries that adopted race-based reparations and race-based redistribution of wealth seriously damaged their economies by doing so, without eliminating racial gaps. Harris is a more enthusiastic supporter of student loan bailouts than Joe Biden. Biden initially doubted his power to forgive student loans, and only embarked on mass student loan forgiveness at the urging of left-wingers like Kamala Harris, over the objections of more sensible people in his administration. Business Insider notes that Treasury Secretary Janet “Yellen was skeptical of a student-loan forgiveness plan as Biden made up his mind,” according to the New York Times, while “Kamala Harris was one of the administration’s most forceful advocates of loan relief.”

Student loan bailouts are a bad idea, because they encourage colleges to raise tuition, enabling the expansion of administrative bloat. Student loan bailouts also prop up low-quality colleges and law schools, and predatory graduate-school programs, that fewer people would attend if they didn’t think they could attend them on student loans that might later be written off at taxpayer expense.

Harris is more likely to win the general election than Biden, because Biden is a relatively unpopular Democrat — as is illustrated by the fact that Democrats perform better on the generic Congressional ballot than Biden does. Harris is also younger than Donald Trump, and some voters care about the president’s age. While Trump had a slight lead over Biden in the polls, the Democrats retained a big financial and organizational edge, leading a leading political polling & prediction website to declare the election a dead heat, with a 51% chance that Trump would win, and a 49% chance that Biden would win. Harris replacing Biden means that the Democrats might achieve a trifecta in 2024 — winning not just the Presidential election, but also control of both houses of Congress. Democrats are already better positioned to win control of the House of Representatives than they were in 2022, when Republicans performed better on the generic Congressional ballot than they do now.