Kamala Harris’s Policy Rollout Is a Flop

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 26, 2024

 

Tom Cotton’s frustration is understandable. He and the rest of the GOP are building a case against a phantom. The artifacts of Kamala Harris’s years in American public life are regarded by her allies in politics and media as salacious rumors, and the persona Harris is crafting for this presidential bid is treated like a fungible commodity. And yet, much as it might pain the press corps, what else are Cotton and the rest of the Republican Party to do but take Harris at her word?

 

That’s the tactic to which the Arkansas senator appealed over the weekend in an interview with ABC News’s Jon Karl. Cotton was interrupted as he rattled off the litany of radical progressive policy preferences Harris endorsed at various points in her career — confiscating certain firearms, prohibiting private health insurance, phasing out the internal combustion engine, and so on. “That is not her position now,” Karl interjected. “She’s not taking the positions on the far left of the party. She’s clearly making a move to the middle.”

 

Cotton rejected the Harris campaign’s spin on the undeniable grounds that the candidate herself hasn’t disavowed anything. He’s right, and Cotton was justified to demand of Harris a more convincing conversion narrative that shows some respect for voters’ intelligence. But Karl’s focus on prepared statements from the campaign identifying what Harris does not believe foreclosed on any discussion of what her campaign insists their candidate does believe. That’s a prudent course for Harris’s allies because the vice president’s limited policy rollout has been a dud.

 

Harris’s plan to revise the tax code encountered some skeptical eyes at the New York Times late last week. The vice president wants to see the corporate-tax rate spike from 21 to 28 percent, with a 21 percent minimum tax on at least 15 percent of the income firms report to investors. She seeks to increase the top marginal income-tax rate. She plans to boost Medicare surcharges, and she intends to tax capital gains at the same rate as income for Americans with over $1 million in investment earnings. But between the preservation of the middle-class tax relief they like and their spending preferences, Democrats still can’t generate the revenue they need to make this scheme remotely feasible. “So, the $5 trillion in tax increases embraced by Ms. Harris this week may not ultimately be enough to cover the cost of her and other Democrats’ ambitions next year,” Times reporter Andrew Duehren grudgingly concluded.

 

Then there’s Harris’s plan to impose a 25 percent tax on “unrealized capital gains” for individuals with $100 million or more in wealth (at least 80 percent of which is locked up in illiquid but tradable assets). Harris’s backdoor “wealth tax” plan runs into the glaring obstacle that “unrealized” gains exist only on paper — they are speculative, fluid, and based on a potential market value rather than concrete terms hammered out between a buyer and a seller. As economists have observed, if this plan became law, it would make it a less profitable proposition to invest in companies with high earnings potential. To this, Harris’s allies have no rebuttal. Instead, they insist that it’s all just talk.

 

“To become law,” Barron’s reporters related to their readers, “the proposal would have to pass Congress, which would only become a possibility if Democrats retain the White House and the Senate and flip the House of Representatives to Democratic control in November.” Market Watch’s Brett Arends deployed a similar argument while talking nervous investors off the ledge. “Never mind that this proposal is nothing new,” he wrote, “and is nowhere near getting passed into law anytime soon, anyway.” Even if Republicans were somehow raptured out of existence, Harris’s party is unlikely to commit economic seppuku. As Dow Jones reporter Victor Reklaitis observed, “Even with Democratic control of both chambers in 2021 and 2022, the Biden-Harris administration struggled to get sufficient support for some of its priorities.”

 

The same argument has been deployed in the effort to take the sting off Harris’s proposal to set prices and regulate profits in economic sectors relating to food production and distribution. According to Politico’s sources on Capitol Hill, “Democrats in Congress have privately been telling critics that this part of the Harris plan is not viable.” Indeed, Harris is not advocating a concrete, scorable policy agenda. Rather, it’s “a messaging tactic” designed to communicate that Harris “understands food prices remain an economic burden.” One might even say that Harris’s plan was meant to be taken seriously, not literally.

 

After all, any effort to draft the Federal Trade Commission into price fixing at that scale is likely to be challenged — by Republicans — in the courts, and there is no hope that such a plan would pass Congress because such legislation would be defeated — again, by Republicans. The implied existence of Republicans who, we can assume, would stand athwart Harris’s objectives is all that renders them viable as political talking points. If Harris’s goals stood a remote chance of sailing through the legislature, she would have to defend them on their merits — a challenge for which even her allies seem unprepared.

 

As Axios’s Felix Salmon explained, Harris’s suite of policy preferences “tend to elicit eye-rolls from economists,” but her goal is only to avoid losing a reckless game of populist one-upmanship with Donald Trump. “If Harris were to stick firmly to ‘more of the same’ policies that don’t directly and immediately promise to give voters more spending power,” he observed, “she could end up losing votes to an opponent whose policies are more popular and less sensible.” Smuggling that assumption into a report on the number of economists who are revulsed by Harris’s efforts to pander to the economically illiterate gives away the game. They know it’s a trick. They just hope you don’t.

 

But the stakes are higher here than Harris’s allies let on. The vice president is writing checks that will one day come due. Her progressive allies expect Harris and the party she leads to make good on the mandate it is seeking from voters, at which point it seems clear that Democrats will rely on their GOP opponents to save them from themselves. If, however, the most you can say for Harris’s policy preferences today is that they are manipulative ephemera destined to be consigned to history’s ash heap, you’re conceding that those are bad policies. No wonder the press would prefer to focus on what Harris’s staff says she doesn’t believe. What she does believe is reckless and foolish.