Having officially tossed her hat in the ring for the 2020 Democratic nomination, California Senator Kamala Harris has trotted out her initial platform to campaign on. Keep in mind that we’re currently experiencing one of the most robust economic recoveries in living memory with low taxes, rising wages and as close as we’re likely to get to full employment. Ms. Harris has come out this week with a statement letting you all know that we’ve had just about enough of that nonsense and she’s going to turn this car around and take us back to 2007. (WaPo)
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) will run for president proposing a nearly $3 trillion tax plan, billions in tax credits to low-income renters, a Medicare-for-all health-care system, and a reduction in cash bail for inmates charged with criminal offenses, her aides said…
Aides said Harris’s platform will incorporate Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all health-care proposal, while also pushing enormous tax relief intended to help low-income renters and boost incomes for working-class families…
Harris, by contrast, is expected to run on both a single-payer health program projected to cost more than $30 trillion, as well as tax benefits that would significantly reduce federal revenue. Supporters say that reflects her willingness to try to use different solutions to solve big problems.
Clearly, Harris knows that she can’t afford to tick off the working class too much, so she’s actually proposing even more tax credits that would supplement working class people while doing little to nothing for low-income workers or those without employment. She describes this as an incentive to reward work. (Actually not a terrible idea if it’s balanced out elsewhere. Sadly, it’s not.) Meanwhile, the “rich” will pay more, but nowhere near enough to offset the additional loss of revenue.
As if that wasn’t enough, she’s promising a single payer, Medicare for all type of healthcare system with a price tag somewhere north of thirty trillion dollars. You may recall that her home state of California tried to push through a similar system a few years ago. That effort went down in flames when the taxpayers got a look at the budget-busting cost. And now she wants to foist this debacle off on the entire nation?
How do we pay for that? For the most part, it sounds like she’s in the camp of We’ll Figure That Out Later. But she has suggested that we can, “eliminating the parts of the Republican tax law passed last fall that benefits the rich, as well as levying a new tax on large financial institutions.” Keep in mind that those “large financial institutions” include most of the outfits that are hiring all of America’s workers. What could possibly go wrong?
She also has a plan to help out people living in unaffordable, high-rent areas. It basically boils down to just giving away money so people can pay their rent rather than addressing the question of why rents are so high to begin with. (Spoiler alert: It’s the law of supply and demand. If cities allowed more housing construction prices would go down.)
This entire package is fairly typical Democratic tax and spend insanity, replete with giving away cash and free stuff to the masses. And, as usual, it ignores the reality that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. If you’re looking for a way to completely bankrupt the country, Kamala Harris may just be the candidate for you!
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