Kamala Harris' economically illiterate agenda will just tank Americans' finances even more

If you’d been robbed by a person, you’d be insane to have that same individual investigate the crime. That’s essentially the situation with Vice President Kamala Harris’s plan to reduce the very inflation she helped cause. Like burglar who won’t admit to the robbery, Harris is casting blame elsewhere and proposing an economically illiterate agenda that would only worsen Americans’ finances.

First, Harris’s response to inflation is entirely wrong. Price increases over the last three and a half years aren’t due to "greedy corporations" or "price gouging," as she alleges. This doesn’t even pass the smell test. Or did all businesses suddenly turn greedy in January 2021, more so than they’d been at any other time in the last four decades?

Clearly not. It was the runaway, profligate spending of the Biden-Harris regime that drive inflation to 40-year highs and credit-card interest rates to record highs. Before scapegoating the boogieman of corporations, Harris should take a long, hard look in the mirror.

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Not only did she cheerlead for trillions of dollars in inflationary deficit spending, she cast the tiebreaking vote on two of the three largest spending bills of this administration. Her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon that killed Americans’ finances.

Furthermore, the Biden-Harris administration’s own data disprove the entire "price-gouging" narrative surrounding inflation. The prices paid by consumers and businesses alike have risen an average of 19.4 percent under this administration, as measured by the producer and consumer price indexes.

That means firms, including grocery stores, have merely passed along their cost increases to consumers. Yet instead of acknowledging this economic reality, Harris wants to impose price controls that will inevitably cause shortages.

America has tried this plenty of times before, such as under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. When fuel price controls were imposed, the nation had crippling gas lines. Harris’s grocery price controls would create bread lines instead. The real culprit here isn’t grocery stores, but soaring spending in Washington, D.C.

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And now Harris wants to spend even more than President Joe Biden, attempting to buy votes with a multitude of taxpayer-funded handouts on everything from student loan bailouts to overexpanding child tax credits. She has yet to explain how she will pay for any of this besides through the hidden tax of more inflation.

Likewise, she wants to further expand Obamacare, which has already been an unmitigated disaster. Americans were promised that that the deceptively name Affordable Care Act would allow them to keep their doctors and health insurance plans, but that promise was swiftly broken as millions of families lost their previous coverage in the wake of that law’s passage.

And now Harris wants to further socialize medicine in America, under the guise of increasing coverage. The dirty little secret is that coverage does not equal care, as countless Americans have discovered since being enrolled in Obamacare plans. With sky-high deductibles, copays and coinsurance, increasing "coverage" is effectively meaningless.

Similarly, her plan to build more housing is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Government construction of homes would take resources out of the hands of the private sector, reducing the number of housing units the latter can build.

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At best, this is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The reality is worse because government doesn’t have a profit motive like the private market does, and so government never uses resources as efficiently as businesses and households do. The same amount of lumber, PVC, and concrete won’t build as many homes in the hands of bureaucrats compared to private homebuilders.

For decades, government has been subsidizing demand in countless industries in a futile attempt to increase affordability. Harris clearly skipped Econ 101, or she’d know that increasing demand puts upward pressure on prices, exacerbating the problem.

Putting thousands of dollars into the pocket of homebuyers will merely cause sellers to respond by increasing asking prices.

Amid all these nonsensical economic proposals from Harris is a promise that makes even less sense: she says she will tackle the inflation problem on her first day in office. Her first day in office was over three and a half years ago, so why didn’t she solve the problem then?

Perhaps it’s because she was way too busy creating it in the first place.

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E. J. Antoni is a research fellow for regional economics in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis and a senior fellow at Committee to Unleash Prosperity.