Kamala Harris, trying desperately to separate herself from her (remarkably unpopular) boss, Joe Biden, and the administration she has loyally served for almost four years, has settled on a new campaign slogan: “A New Way Forward.” A quick review reveals, though, that Harris’s proposals don’t offer much in the way of “new,” or “forward” – they’re the same tired, liberal, Big Government clichés Democrats have been offering for years. Her plans add up to the same thing we’re used to seeing from Democrats before her – more spending, higher taxes, and higher prices, with more power in Washington and less freedom for you.
Start with her most obvious Big Government proposal – Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ single-payer system healthcare proposal, which would have eliminated private health insurance for the roughly 200 million individuals in the United States presently covered by it, and replaced it with a government-run system that was estimated to cost a jaw-dropping $33 trillion over a decade. Just months after being sworn in to her first term in the U.S. Senate, Harris signed on as a cosponsor of that budget-busting, freedom-destroying legislation that would have upended one-sixth of the U.S. economy and put government bureaucrats between patients and doctors. It would have reduced medical innovation and driven up healthcare costs for every American.
Her current campaign says she “no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program,” but that never came out of her mouth, it was only a statement made by a campaign aide to a reporter. Further, she said in her debate with former President Trump (where, interestingly, she was never asked directly whether she still supported a government takeover of the healthcare system), that “access to health care should be a right.” When liberals say something should be a “right,” what they really mean is, “taxpayers should pay for it” – because what good is a right if only wealthy people can afford to exercise it?
Harris’ plans for more government spending and bigger government, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “would increase primary deficits by … $2 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes a reduction in economic activity.” The model projects that spending would increase (above its already bloated levels) by an additional $2.3 trillion over 10 years, while the economy would shrink – down 1.3 percent by 2034, and by 4 percent within 30 years. Most ominously, projects the model, “These conventional gains and losses do not include the negative impact of the additional debt burden on future generations who must finance most of the spending increases.”
Now look at the U.S. corporate tax rate. When Donald Trump became president, that rate was one of the highest in the developed world – 35 percent. With the help of a GOP Congress, Trump cut that rate down to 21 percent, and made America more competitive. The 21 percent rate is in line with – but still slightly higher than – the average corporate tax rate in Asia (where it averages 19.8 percent) and Europe (where it averages 19.92 percent). With the GOP’s 2017 rate cut, job growth soared. More Americans were employed than ever before, and the unemployment rate hit its lowest point in 50 years.
Harris, by contrast, wants to raise the corporate tax rate by a third, hiking it from its current 21 percent level back up to 28 percent. Raising that rate by 33 percent would have devastating effects on overall economic growth and job growth.
Further, Harris says she wants to make family life “more affordable.” To her, however, that doesn’t mean taking action to reduce the 40-year-high inflation over which her administration presided, it means growing government further by creating more, and more expensive, government programs.
For example, she has proposed a $6,000 tax credit for the first year of a child’s life, and wants to bring back the COVID-era expanded Child Tax Credit. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, these proposed change to the tax code would cost $1.6 trillion over a decade.
She has proposed a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, in an effort “to make housing costs more affordable.” But handing out taxpayer money will just goose the price of housing, as home sellers adjust to the new economic reality. Meanwhile, the cost to taxpayers is projected to be $200 billion over four years, and more if the program is made permanent.
Harris’ ideal is a government so big we wouldn’t want it even if it were free. It’s not just the additional cost – trillions of dollars, which will be added to the national debt and passed on to our children and grandchildren – it’s the growth in the size and scope of the federal government and the permanent bureaucracy. Every additional bureaucrat hired to tend to one of her new programs represents a loss of freedom for every individual in America, a ceding of more and more power to Washington, leaving less and less freedom for us.
Those proposals are not “new,” and they won’t take us “forward.” They just add up to more Big Government.