Vice President Kamala Harris is an concepts candidate. That is what a string of current opinion items about her financial agenda attempt to persuade us of anyway.
In a Tuesday column, The Washington Publish‘s Heather Lengthy writes that she sees in Harris’ “alternative economic system”—that seize bag of subsidies to companies giant and small, value controls on meals and housing, tariffs on imported items, tax credit for fogeys, and a name to construct 3 million new properties—a coherent philosophy of “honest capitalism” or “middle-class capitalism.”
Harris is breaking from the left-right dichotomy, says Lengthy, together with her plan to each construct issues and create new subsidies. Her activity now could be “to outline her financial philosophy in order that voters can see it—and perceive how they match into it.”
In that very same vein, a couple of weeks earlier in The New York Instances, former Biden administration financial advisor Jen Harris elaborated on how Vice President Harris was creating a complete new model of economics targeted on “constructing” (actually constructing housing, renewable power, and many others.) and “balancing” (value controls, antitrust enforcement, and many others.).
Constructing “focuses on pointing and shaping markets towards worthy goals,” whereas balancing “corrects upstream energy imbalances in order that market outcomes are fairer and wish much less after-the-fact redistribution,” she writes.
By fusing these strands collectively, Harris is “telling a extra holistic and completely new story about how the economic system works and the goals it ought to serve,” reads the Instances column.
Is she actually?
Harris would hardly be the primary presidential candidate, and even the primary Democratic presidential candidate, to pitch herself as a champion of the center class. In a middle-class nation, that is fairly normal political rhetoric.
Likewise, each Democratic president, from Barack Obama to John F. Kennedy, has referred to as for some mixture of financial development, authorities funding, redistribution, and regulation.
Harris is likely to be speaking extra about constructing housing and antitrust enforcement than previous Democratic candidates, however she’s nonetheless following a well-worn playbook.
Certainly, Harris’ few concrete financial insurance policies look much less like a coherent philosophy and extra like a confused self-defeating agenda.
The vp says she desires to make housing extra reasonably priced by constructing extra models and capping hire will increase on present models. However hire management has a well-earned repute for lowering new development. One plank of Harris’ housing affordability agenda is working towards the opposite.
That looks as if much less “constructing” and “balancing” and extra like simply constructing much less.
And if “upstream” antitrust enforcement is meant to minimize the necessity for redistribution, as Jen Harris claims in her Instances column, why is Kamala Harris nonetheless proposing a raft of latest subsidies and tax credit? Regardless of all that constructing and balancing, we nonetheless want extra redistribution too, I assume.
This all smacks of contradiction, not synthesis.
Maybe essentially the most direct argument towards Harris being an concepts candidate with an financial philosophy all her personal is that she by no means articulates what that philosophy is.
When requested about her “alternative economic system” within the uncommon interviews that she has finished, Harris struggles to say what the concept is past retelling her private story and rehashing her requires a few extra subsidies.
Take the interview Harris simply did final week with 6ABC Philadelphia anchor Brian Taff. Taff asks Harris to call two insurance policies she has for bringing down costs and making issues extra reasonably priced for individuals.
In response, Harris talks for practically two minutes about her upbringing in a middle-class Oakland neighborhood earlier than finally getting round to mentioning her plan to offer tax credit and subsidies to new small companies, dwelling builders, and residential purchasers.
This, Harris says, will assist individuals additional their very own “goals and aspirations.”
She stated one thing related when asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about what she would do on her first day within the White Home.
Harris stated to Bash: “I’ll let you know at first considered one of my highest priorities is to do what we are able to to assist and strengthen the center class. Once I have a look at the aspirations, the targets, the ambitions of the American individuals, I feel that individuals are prepared for a brand new manner ahead in a manner that generations of Individuals have been fueled by—by hope and by optimism.”
When pressed by Bash for one particular motion, Harris reeled off some extra boilerplate about bringing prices down and investing in households earlier than mentioning her particular coverage proposal for a $6,000 little one tax credit score.
There’s much more pandering and pablum in Harris’ solutions than any philosophizing in regards to the construction of the economic system.
The obvious takeaway is not that Harris has some new-fangled method to financial coverage. Somewhat, it is that she unexpectedly discovered herself on the high of the Democratic ticket and has been greedy for a coverage agenda ever since.
Within the rush to cobble that agenda collectively, she’s picked up on some comparatively recent concepts (assist the non-public sector construct extra properties), some stale ones (homebuyer and small enterprise subsidies), and some already tried disasters (value controls).
However there isn’t any coherent thought connecting these insurance policies. Columnists can do all of the heavy lifting they need to try to discover a connecting thread. However the reality is there may be simply no there there.
