While President Joe Biden gave Vice President Kamala Harris a short enough campaign season for her to evade any real scrutiny from Democratic hagiographers in the media, Harris could theoretically pull from her prior failed 2020 presidential bid to fill up her currently non-existent slate of policy proposals.
But even as Harris pretends she never endorsed nationalizing 30% of the nation’s economy and banning private health insurance and fracking, she has taken a full month to borrow from different presidential campaigns to construct a new fiscal policy agenda. From former President Richard Nixon, she is taking the tried and failed doctrine of price controls. And, oddly, she is trying to steal the current tax proposals of her opponents: Former president Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
A mere matter of months after Trump broke from Republican orthodoxy to endorse exempting tips from personal income taxation for service workers, Harris announced that same policy as her first-ever economic proposal as her party’s presidential nominee. It’s weird enough to borrow your political opponent’s idea without attribution, but it’s even stranger that the Biden-Harris administration has intentionally beefed up IRS enforcement specifically to collect more from tipped workers. And its PRO Act proposal would jack up those same workers’ taxes even further. Harris is contradicting her own administration’s policy without admitting it.
Then, just a few days after Vance endorsed a $5,000 child tax credit, Harris announced her support for a $6,000 one.
Where Harris really takes the cake is her primary solution to the inflation created by her tiebreaking votes for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and $1.3 trillion Inflation Reduction Act. In response to a 20% increase in overall prices since she became vice president, and a 4% decrease in real average weekly wages, Harris has borrowed from a president who began the only inflationary cycle worse than the one stoked by her and Biden: Former President Richard Nixon.
Like Nixon, Harris wants to crush the inflation she created with literal price controls.
A version of a Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)-authored bill that Harris co-sponsored while she was in the Senate, the vice president’s new plan would freeze grocery prices nationwide by empowering the Federal Trade Commission, as well as state attorneys general, “to investigate and levy penalties on food companies that violate the federal ban.”
The Nixon shock was enacted with a similar purpose and resulted in predictable disaster. As Harris and Biden have tried to do with an unprecedented series of annual $2 trillion deficits, Nixon intentionally wanted to devalue the U.S. dollar, which he did successfully by blowing up the Bretton Woods international monetary system only to be met with catastrophic consequences, and use price controls to avoid the unavoidable consequence of inflation.
Although those Nixon price controls earned temporary plaudits from the economic illiterates at the New York Times, all they did was delay and exacerbate the inevitable. Long before the start of the Arab Oil embargo that has retroactively received disproportionate blame for the stagflation of the 70s, Nixon’s price controls produced dramatic shortages of gas and energy. When the price and wage controls, which Nixon said would last for only 90 days, were lifted two years later, inflation rapidly doubled from an annual rate of 3% in 1972 to 6% the year later and 11% the year after that.
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Harris’s plan would prove no less idiotic and, given the target, perhaps would be even more so. Unlike the rest of the private industry, which generates an average profit margin of 8.5%, grocery stores only average a profit margin of a single percentage point. And unlike hotel prices, which are up 44% since Biden took office, and gasoline, which is up 49%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the prices of food at home, or groceries, have increased 21.08%, which is roughly on par with the overall consumer price index increase of almost 20%.
Harris may not want to borrow from her own prior flirtations with socialism, and stealing from Trump and Vance doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in her intellect. But poaching from the proto-communist experiments that created the only inflationary crisis worse than her own would make the implosion of Bidenomics seem like a warm-up to the main event.
