Kamala Harris's delightfully stupid campaign kickoff

A WaPo columnist, no less, acidly observes, "When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?"

Kamala Harris is a functioning adult, which is the reason, and perhaps the only reason, she replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. Still, her precise level of functioning has yet to be determined, given her typical (and earned) obscurity as Vice President.

The first signs should give cheer to the Trump campaign. Last week, Harris gave a big speech rolling out her plan for our inflation-ridden economy. It was bad enough that, even if you flunked Econ 101, it would make your eyes roll.

Q: What’s the one thing you don’t do in a major campaign speech? A: Propose an extremist program the entire country knows is a failure. But that’s what Harris did.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Harris’s political problem is that the Biden-Harris economic policies have delivered inflation and declining real incomes.

Yes, let’s start with that. It wasn’t robber baron greed, it wasn’t sunspots, and it wasn’t the bogeyman. It was the Biden/Harris administration’s decision to print up and hand out billions of dollars we don’t have. Ballooning the money supply without a corresponding creation of more real wealth produces inflation. Period. Harris’s scare tactics are equal parts fear-mongering, economic ignorance, and dishonesty. (But it’s only Donald Trump with character issues, mind you).

The high price of food is a particular sore point, and the Vice President’s response is to make it worse by resorting to Venezuelan-style left-wing populism. That’s no exaggeration.

Gads, and here I was hoping for mere Scandanavia.

On Friday she floated a “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries,” including “new authority” for the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to punish companies for charging too much.

“Price gouging” is the term Lefties use for merchants charging nominally more when the government debases the value of the currency. Like I said, conjure up the bogeyman. Republicans often bemoan the Democrats’ playing to low-information voters, but this is taking it way beyond that. It’s more like the witless parent trying to convince his five year-old that there really is a monster in the closet.

This sounds like legislation introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that would ban “grossly excessive prices” as determined by the Federal Trade Commission. Business violations would carry a penalty of up to 5% of annual revenue. This would effectively let the FTC set prices. But what is an excessive price? Is $4 too much for a gallon of milk in Omaha? Is it a different price in Miami? FTC Chair Lina Khan and her army of bureaucrats would presumably decide.

One thing we’ve seen a lot of lately is breast-beating by libertarian-friendly, small-government “conservatives” that we have to go with Ms. Harris because Trump is a Government Power dictator-in-waiting. When, courtesy of that same Ms. Harris, dictatorship proposes to come to your daily walk down the grocery store aisle, where are these “conservatives”? Still obsessing about the Capitol riot, I guess. This is not to mention the shortages and distortions price controls always produce — not for nothing did the WSJ title its piece, “Kamala Harris Endorses Nixonomics.”

There is also no evidence that supermarkets or other food retailers are gouging anyone. Food prices are higher than they were before the Biden Presidency, but that is because of inflation. Retail grocery prices have risen roughly in tandem with wholesale prices. Supermarkets also have narrow margins on sales—roughly 2%, compared to 8% on average for other businesses.

There’s no chance that Harris’s advisors don’t know this even if Harris doesn’t. This raises two possibilities: Either she does know it, in which case the ultimate responsibility for this stellar dishonesty rests with her; or she doesn’t know it, in which case she’s no more fit to be President than her largely senile boss.

Fixing prices is a recipe for shortages, as controls would discourage grocery suppliers. Voilà, empty store shelves. Price controls have led to shortages everywhere they’ve been tried, from Moscow to Caracas.

The last American President to impose wage and price controls was Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. He had to stage a humiliating retreat amid shortages and market dislocations, and prices immediately soared when controls were lifted. If Ms. Harris really believes in this price-fixing, she lacks the most basic understanding of economics. If she is merely floating it to be able to get “price gouging” into a speech, her cynicism is also telling.

I can’t say it any better than that.

Much has been written about the trouble Trump is having getting his footing after Biden stepped away and Harris became the nominee. But Harris’s opening salvo last week on perhaps the biggest issue facing the country was so bad — so ignorant, so oblivious, so eager to embrace the worst of Big Government, and so ready to swallow proven failure — that, if we had an honest press, we’d be hearing a boatload of second guessing about whether it really would have been a better idea for the Democrats to have an open convention and an open debate rather than simply anoint Biden’s second fiddle.

But no, nothing like that. Just more about how the “vibes” are with the bold, new and exciting Kamala! Meanwhile, Trump still is nothing but orange hair, small hands, the putative “insurrection,” and his upcoming sentencing date with the wonderfully fair-minded Judge Merchan.

Still, maybe Ms. Harris had other things to say that were more fully thought through. Ummmmm, well………….

Ms. Harris’s other ideas aren’t much better. She wants an expanded $3,600 child tax credit, with a bonus to $6,000 for newborns, which together would cost more than $1.2 trillion over a decade. These would be essentially a guaranteed income since Ms. Harris wants to make the credits fully refundable—i.e., available for people who don’t work.

She also wants to revive the American Rescue Plan’s earned-income tax credit boost for childless households, roughly tripling it to $1,500 from $600. Democrats claim the credit promotes work, but studies show otherwise. It’s also rife with fraud. The Internal Revenue Service estimates the “improper payment rate” is about 25%.

The Biden-Harris inflation has made homes unaffordable for most young families, and her brainstorm for that is . . . more subsidies. Ms. Harris wants $25,000 in down-payment assistance for “first-time” home buyers. But this would merely drive home prices higher.

Kind of how massive government underwriting of college tuition has driven tuition through the roof, or massive government underwriting of medical costs has driven them through the roof.

Decades of progressive policy failures are bad and grating enough on their own, but please God, could you make them less expensive?

We could go on about her other ideas, such as her embrace of Mr. Biden’s $5 trillion in tax increases. But the ideas she claimed as her own Friday reveal a candidate whose economic judgment is deeply flawed.

“Deeply flawed” is a euphemism. Biden is merely a follower of the increasingly strident Leftism of his Party; Harris, San Francisco Democrat that she is, is one of its leaders, wearing slightly more photogenic lipstick than Ilhan Omar’s Squad. If she does become President, Biden’s empty aimlessness will look good beside the anything-but-aimless direction she has in mind for the country.

UPDATE: The excellent Washington Post column I referred to at the outset is very much worth your time.