By Matthew Foldi
In the final months of the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris still does not have a single policy listed on her campaign website. In advance of this week’s presidential debate, her campaign aides have been reversing her positions on everything from bans on plastic straws to Medicare for All to the Green New Deal.
One area where her campaign has refused to offer much clarity is perhaps the most important of all: the economy. Outside of her plan to ban whatever “price gaging” on food is, all voters can rely on is her actual record, which is filled with policies that make Bidenomics look like the second coming of Arthur Laffer’s dreams.
During her time in the Senate, Harris was a primary sponsor of the Monthly Economic Support Act, a radical bill that would have sent recurring payments of $2,000 to millions of Americans. While the idea seems noble, and even sensible, its stratospheric costs would have almost certainly outweighed its benefits. Her allies in this scheme, which would of course have instantly added massively to inflation, were Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.).
At the time, Markey confessed that its cost was staggeringly high, telling a local NBC News affiliate that “the program would cost about $5 trillion, between now and the end of the year, but it’s a price we’re going to have to pay.” It was designed to continue until the president ended the coronavirus-induced state of emergency, and then it would continue for another three months.
While in hindsight, the bill has certainly aged worse than the Deshaun Watson trade did for the Cleveland Browns, Harris has shown no signs of abandoning her inflationary impulses. As a presidential candidate, she wants to dole out $25,000 for first-time home buyers. All this will accomplish in practice is making all homes, whether for new homeowners or others, $25,000 more expensive.
Of course, Harris’s 2020 bill, like most of her ideas, went nowhere. But, consider the numbers behind it. President Joe Biden did not end the pandemic until April, 2023, and Harris’s bill would have paid Americans until last July. Her proposal totaled approximately $500 billion every month; if it had been implemented, its price tag would have totaled around $20 trillion, a number so staggering that it is important to contextualize.
In all of the 2023 fiscal year, the entire federal government spent $6.13 trillion. Her bill would have almost doubled the entire budget. Social Security, the government’s single largest annual outlay, costs $1.2 trillion per year, less than a quarter of the Harris proposal. In fact, her proposal would have cost more than the next four most expensive programs combined.
In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic started, America has added almost $10 trillion to the national debt. Across that same time frame, this one proposal of Kamalanomics alone would have cost double.
Harris’s defenders surely would argue that giving Americans cash in their pockets during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would offset complicating economic factors. Economists, and common sense, however, would argue that flooding the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars a month would further devastate a flailing economy and cause inflation the likes of which we have never known.
But if the past continues to be prologue, it’s only a matter of time before both an unnamed aide tells us that Harris no longer supports the bill she once attached her name to (which is, of course, what happened with both Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored) and that the press corps assures us that she actually never backed it to begin with, as it did with her previous role of border czar.
Note: Matthew Foldi, a friend of the show and investigative reporter at The Spectator, is the author of the opinions expressed herein. These views do not reflect those of the Breaking Battlegrounds staff.
