Kamala Harris is promising a massive payment to all first-time home buyers who complain they cannot afford to buy a home due to the economy under the Biden-Harris administration. Harris would also give the largest child tax credit ever to parents under a certain income level.
Harris also promised to cut costs by reducing “price gouging” by companies. Such Soviet-style government control over private industry will cause businesses to reduce employees to maintain profit margins. Harris either knows that and doesn’t care or misunderstands basic economics. She has not released any hard policies, so we are left to guess.
Regardless, government cannot simultaneously spend pallets of cash it has yet to print and reduce government spending. However, it is campaign season and reality has officially been suspended. Harris promises to give $25,000 to all first-time home buyers if they pay their rent on time for 24 months and a $6,000 tax credit to people for each of their kids.
No one has put a camera in her face and asked “How are you going to find $25,000 per home buyer? Where will the money come from?” “What about people who lost their first home during Covid and are trying again to be homeowners?”
Will she take the cash from evil companies and hand it to home buyers? Will the wealth distribution be direct or indirect? Will the earmark be buried in a 10,000-page omnibus aid bill for Iran and Hamas? Is this like a high school kid promising chocolate cake for lunch and cancelation of all homework as his platform for student council president?
She Won’t Deliver
Iif elected, Harris will not likely deliver on her freebie promises. There is no such thing as a free lunch — or downpayment. Congress and the Constitution will block her, and she will blame the evil Republicans. Rinse. Repeat.
Even if that were not true, the smarter focus should be on cutting back on cost-prohibitive socialism and improving the economy so people can make their own financial decisions rather than lining up for a handout of $25,000 or a $6,000 tax credit. Imagine selling your vote for $37,000 to help you, your wife, and two kids, and getting none of it. That must be how many of the people Biden-Harris promised loan forgiveness feel. Too soon?
For their part, the venerable Sens. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., conclude that inflation is really caused by one thing — greedy CEOs. CEOs are no greedier today than they were during the last five Republican administrations, but I did not hear past calls to take over private companies and tell them what they can charge for their products. Corporate salaries do not cause inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods does.
Also, who thinks Harris, or any president, could take on the whole of American industry and make it collectively bend the knee? If Harris is elected and any of her policies harshly impact the bottom lines of small and big businesses, companies will reflexively cut staff to decrease operating costs to cover the hit. Unemployment would skyrocket. Costs of supporting the unemployed fall on the shoulders of the taxpayers. This would move money around and not fix anything. It certainly wouldn’t reduce the federal deficit.
A common Democrat response to the concept that businesses will implement workarounds for crazy policies is that the feds would prohibit companies from imposing such layoffs. Sure. How far would this takeover of the means of production go? All the way to communism, or would it pull up just short?
Soviet Style
In 2009, a famous leader accused a resident business owner of unbridled greed to the detriment of his workers and likened him and others like him to cockroaches. He said: “You have made thousands of people hostage to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism — or maybe simply your trivial greed.”
He humiliated the executive on video by making him sit in front of an audience and sign paperwork to use his personal money to fill orders and pay employees more money to restart a company town. It was Vladimir Putin, and the executive was Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum company owner who is now broke.
Harris is promising to sprint down that path. The most profitable U.S. companies (measured by profits per employee) include Apple, Pfizer, Netflix, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta — all massive donors to Democrats. Does anyone think Harris will drag before her and humiliate their CEOs on national television and take their compensation or shareholders’ money and redistribute it to cover $25,000 for first-time home buyers?
Our elected officials should focus on establishing long-term health of the economy so people can make their own decisions with their own money, not making promises to break their employers and hand people “free” stuff in exchange for their votes.
If Harris won’t answer the “how” question, it is up to Team Trump to explain why none of this will happen, that these promises are all lies, and that any miraculously kept plans would boomerang on us as a country. If conservatives fail to do that, Americans could get a hard taste of Marxism that will require decades to rinse from their mouths.
As we know, people can vote their way into socialism but have to shoot their way out. We should avoid that at all reasonable costs and the time to do so is now.
