Martha Range (@MartaVonRunge)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/harris_economic_plan_rebrands_democrats_old_playbook.html August 21, 2024 Harris Economic Plan Rebrands Democrats’ Old Playbook By S.T. Karnick Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris outlined her “Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families” in a widely anticipated speech in Raleigh, North Carolina last Friday. Far from being an agenda, with actual costs and benefits specified, Harris’s plan is a slapdash assortment of ideas for even greater interference in the economy by the people who broke it in the first place. Harris’s program does have a consistent theme: she will create an “opportunity economy” by “building up our middle class” and lowering costs of housing, health care, and groceries. That echoes the rhetoric Harris and President Joe Biden have continually used to camouflage their destructive, big-government, antibusiness policies. The Democrat Party has a multidecade history of thwarting opportunity and the “middle class” and causing inflation and other economic destruction. Harris’s announced program merely rebrands the Democrats’ system of interest group payoffs and is in no way a positive, organized plan for rebuilding the bourgeoisie. Shamelessly stretching a sheepskin over the rabid wolf that is Democrat governance, Harris butters up the normies with repeated mentions of “families,” the “middle class,” “children,” “workers” and “hardworking Americans.” She rebrands Democrat interest-group politics as an appeal to the middle-income taxpayers to whom she and the Democrats have been sticking it for decades, attempting to replay the successful strategy of Bill Clinton’s 1990s presidential campaigns. Harris is no Bill Clinton. Harris was the farthest-left U.S. senator of her time, out-communizing even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) (which few would have thought possible), and then the vice president of a Potemkin presidency that may be the farthest-left in history. Her instincts are all for big government and Democrat interest-group pandering. Harris is slathering phony populist rhetoric thickly on good old-fashioned Democrat vote-buying. Harris says, for example, that she wants to restore the COVID-era expanded child tax credit of up to $3,600 per child per year and boost that to $6,000 for children in their first year. Tax cuts are always good, though limiting them to favored groups of people is a hoary Democrat tactic that suppresses economic expansion and feeds inflation by directing money toward consumption instead of investment. The same is true of Harris’s promise to cut the costs of health care and prescription drugs. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars per year and a strangling morass of regulations have ruined the nation’s health care system. Adding to that mess will only increase the harm. and more...