Kamala Harris’s Video-Game Economy

National Review Online

Tuesday, October 01, 2024

 

After being ridiculed for not having a policy platform, the Kamala Harris campaign released an 82-page document outlining the vice president’s ideas on the economy. No longer suffering from lack of detail, it still suffers from lack of good sense.

 

The Harris view of economics is that the United States is a single-player video game, and the federal government is the player. Creating a thriving economy is simply a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order.

 

Harris has replaced her formerly far-left economic views with minutely technocratic ones. Democrats want to use their freshly expanded IRS to micromanage flows of money in the economy through an even more invasive and convoluted system of tax credits than already exists.

 

She wants to make permanent and expand Obamacare premium tax credits set to expire at the end of next year. She thinks the budget-busting green-energy tax credits from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act have been a roaring success and wants them continued and expanded.

 

Harris’s housing policy is a slew of tax credits, for homebuyers and homebuilders alike. The platform cites praise from the National Association of Homebuilders as though it means something more than that its members would be grateful to receive billions of taxpayer dollars during a Harris presidency.

 

Small businesses also would be recipients of new and expanded tax credits, government loans, and government contracts. Never mind that when the National Federation of Independent Businesses asks small-business owners which of 75 problems are the most severe, access to loans and government contracts are near the bottom. The No. 1 concern is the cost of health insurance, in large part due to Obamacare. Economic uncertainty, the tax and regulatory burdens, and energy costs also rank highly.

 

Harris claims multiple times she wants to cut red tape, in areas such as small business, housing, and energy. We’re wondering where her deregulatory efforts have been as vice president. The Biden-Harris administration so far has added $1.7 trillion in regulatory costs. She’d have to be the biggest red-tape cutter in American history just to get back to where this administration started in 2021.

 

Market prices are generally a problem to Harris. Aside from overriding them with tax credits, she wants a federal law against price-gouging and believes government can better direct investment than capital markets. She reiterates the “greedflation” story of rising prices that Biden and the media have popularized.

 

The platform villainizes “Wall Street investors” while also proudly touting that Goldman Sachs estimates higher economic growth from Harris’s plans than from Trump’s. It attacks “big corporations” while noting that nearly 100 business leaders have endorsed Harris for president.

 

All these policies accumulate points in the video game’s scoring system, courtesy of Moody’s Analytics, which is led by Mark Zandi, Democrats’ go-to economist. Consistent with Zandi’s corpus, major themes of which include “spending good” and “Republicans bad,” Harris’s economic plans would lead to strong growth and job creation, while Trump’s would cause a recession almost immediately.

 

Maximizing her spending rating, minimizing her taxation damage, playing her middle-class power-ups, and making sure to hit the swing-state boosts no doubt earn Harris a good score in the video-game economy. But in real life, things don’t work the same way.

 

The government faces major budget questions next year when the individual provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire and the debt limit will need to be raised. Harris still does not have a plan to deal with those looming deadlines.

 

More fundamentally, in real life the government is not the only player, and it shouldn’t be the most important player. The American people are not NPCs that passively respond to the government’s moves. They have the potential to innovate and provide for themselves, and to interact with each other in productive ways no government can foresee.

 

Neither far-left 2019 Harris nor technocratic 2024 Harris believes that to be true.