Actually, Kamala Harris has given her answer on the problem of inflation

The ears have it

J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative, Sept 15, 2024

Feature image: Affordable housing. Pexels.

Let’s listen with our ears.

Pundits have been complaining in the last few days, somewhat understandably, that even under direct questioning, candidate Harris has failed to address what she would do about rampant inflation.

But she has, in fact, addressed the question.  She’s given an answer we need have no uncertainty about – or unclarity, for that matter.

The short summary is that she has wrapped inflation into “problems with the economy,” and framed problems with the economy in two well-known political frameworks.  The frameworks are (a) complaints about the sense of entitlement of “privilege” groups, and (b) the use of public money to cultivate favored constituencies with subsidies.

The latter, framework (b), is depicted by socialist progressivism, properly and correctly defined, as government managing the priorities of the economy and how it serves the people through incentive, reward, and system output (i.e., getting more “just” and necessary products, like high salaries for education administrators and subsidies for “green” enterprises, and fewer questionable and less-just products like single-family houses, recreational off-road vehicles, lucrative men’s professional sports, and aircraft carriers).

The former, framework (a), is depicted by critical theory ideologues as a means of shifting privilege rightfully to those with better attitudes than the “privilege” groups.

But this commentary by Fox News is typical.  It quotes former president Trump referring to Harris’s response, in the interview aired on 13 September with ABC Philadelphia’s Brian Taff, as “word salad,” and emphasizes that Harris’s response isn’t recognizably connected to the inflation issue, per se.  It leaves the matter at that, citing complaints that Harris hasn’t told us anything about her plan.

The plan is an ideological reframing of the question

But she has told us about her plan.  And what she has told us is an astonishing exercise in divisive demagoguery on economic and social issues.  If you actually know anything about the thought-canon of socialist progressivism, that’s what she has outlined with her response.

You can read the words she uses in the Fox article.  They’re the words by which she conveys framework (a):  the deserving condition of the non-privileged.  That framework is implied by her rather halting discussion of how she and her mother and the people she knew growing up worked hard, very hard.  She doesn’t explicitly say they were “people of color,” understood to have less or no privilege and therefore to need to work “hard.”  But she slips in a key point each time she goes into this canned speech.

Listen with your ears.  Harris speaks of her mother working very hard and finally saving up enough money to buy a house.  Previous comments by Harris on the economy show that she’s constantly referring to the cost of buying a house as a big problem in the overall cost of living – something few would disagree with, but not the main topic they have in mind when asking her about inflation.  When they ask about inflation, they’re asking about prices at the gas pump and the supermarket.

But Harris wants to talk about the cost of housing.  So she talks about that, and appeals for common ground in understanding that to be a major issue of economic affordability.

Except:  she doesn’t really stick with the “common ground” idea.  Here’s the veiled barb (emphasis added):  “I grew up in a community of hard-working people, you know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. And I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience.”

She goes on to make a point that “not everyone has access to the resources that can fuel” people’s “aspirations and dreams.”

Privilege

There it is:  the “privilege” distinction, tagged on but unmistakable.  There’s a whole fat, sloppy, cancerous mass of implication here:  that some of the people know what it is to work hard, very hard, and have to save up for years to buy a house – but others don’t.  (We even have a wing of the Republican Party that agrees with and pushes this notion, lambasting America’s lower middle-class for being angry about having hard work pay off less and less, and losing heart and hope when its jobs go away, and it takes two jobs to do what one could once do, and those two jobs won’t let you afford to buy a house.  Jeb! was one of those leaders, actually coming out and extolling immigrants for being willing to work harder for less pay, instead of – like selfish, childish Americans – seeing no reason why they should have to do that when they didn’t have to before, and the difference is that the harder-less-pay economy is the result of being arbitrarily regulated into a coma by socialist progressivism.)

We’ll hear next, listening with our ears, why and how this is a political MacGuffin, setting up the fullness of Harris’s response.

Notice that Fox News doesn’t pick up on the fullness.  No one seems to.  But if you listen with your ears, it comes through loud and clear.

Agenda

Fox doesn’t mention the meat of her plan.  But it’s the plan she talks about now as her answer to our problems with the economy.

LISTEN.  It’s in the final sentence in the passage in this video clip from the Taff interview.

She segues to her plan to assist small businesses.  She’s not just meandering through word salad here.  What comes next is key.  But no one goes on to quote it the way she frames it: as the answer to the question on inflation.

It’s the plan she came out with in the debate with Trump, and it’s the plan she outlines in her economic stump speech.  It follows every word-salad introduction.  It’s pure managerial progressivism on a socialist model.

She’s going to give up to $50,000 in tax breaks for small-business start-ups.

She’s going to increase the child credit for federal income tax to $6,000 a head.

And she’s going to give new home-buyers up to $25,000 in purchase assistance.

She laid this out in the same response to the inflation question cited by Fox from the ABC Philadelphia interview.  She’s laid it out multiple times now.

But apparently the editors and pundits can’t see that this is her answer.

She’s going to use the household pain of a dreadfully ill-managed set of federal and state regulations – on energy, fiscal policy (i.e., spending), monetary policy, (lack of) border security, trade policy, employment and other business practices, crime and public safety (and hence business costs) – to justify more government intervention in the economy, on the socialist progressive model of picking and choosing economic priorities.

If you think clients of a tax break for small businesses will get that break for any old start-up they have mind, you haven’t been paying attention.  Those breaks will go to favored businesses and business sectors.  You probably wouldn’t give the breaks where Harris would.

The transformational perspective you weren’t thinking of

On that head, I commend to you the 1993 movie Dave (Ivan Reitman), in which Kevin Kline plays a man who’s the spitting image of the President, and who spends several weeks secretly substituting for POTUS after POTUS suffers a stroke.  This flick has Hollywood’s syrupy emotional version of what constitutes a righteous business, one to support and admire.  Besides Dave’s temp agency, there’s a small accounting business run by Dave’s friend Murray, played by Charles Grodin, which despises revenue and profit and hires random people just because they need work, heedless of what the business itself needs.

This is such a great business model, according to the movie narrative, that the Murray Blum character is brought to the White House by Dave to find all the bad accounting practices of the evil, stroke-afflicted president’s callous administration, because not caring about balancing your books but only about hiring people just because they need jobs is how things really get done.

Of course, that’s the fatuous, heart-tugging narrative about the righteous political perspective on business.  America knows from bitter experience that the actual perspective of progressivism is crony money, constituency-tending, and extortion.

You’ll get the $50,000 if you propose the right kind of start-up – and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, assuming she survives her electoral race this fall, along with others like her, will be the expert economists who decide what that is.  It’s not going to be your lawn-care business with its object of tending all those planet-killing lawns and its necessary accoutrement of CO2-emitting carry-all vehicles for your equipment.

It’s not going to be your gun store.  It’s not going to be your non-union plumbing and heat-&-air business.  It’s not going to be your oilfield services business.

The $6,000 child credit on income taxes, meanwhile, is meant in part to mitigate the impact of the inflation that will be left to continue inflicting economic damage.  (Don’t doubt me when I point out that it’s also meant to help you patronize expensive services that will put other people in charge of your youngest children for hours each day.)

Opinions may differ on how much the Biden and Harris political contingent wants affirmatively to inflict damage.  But many will agree that their contingent does want to impose its ideological regulatory agenda badly enough to incur the damage and not seek to actually roll it back.

The agenda is the priority:  as iterated above, energy, fiscal policy (i.e., spending), monetary policy, border security (that is, stripping it away), trade policy, employment and other business practices, crime and public safety (and hence increasing business costs).  Add “climate” policy and other agenda items you know are on the list (e.g., universal pre-K). The painful economic consequences must be left in place because the agenda must be thoroughly implemented.

Which brings us to the $25,000 home-buyers’ assistance program.  I strongly recommend against any starry-eyed vision of what people will get $25,000 to help with their purchases of.

Reeducating expectations (so much better than reducing inflation)

The policy implemented by executive fiat in Mayor Karen Bass’s Los Angeles tells us what people are going to get $25,000 for.  Property developers are rushing to participate in her program, because it increases their profit on far less land than they’d have to develop and build infrastructure for in the highly-regulated California suburbs.

Bass’s program cuts red tape, including environmental impact studies and community-approval time, because it implements a socialist progressive agenda.  The agenda is very high-density housing – apartments – mostly in high-rise structures.  It’s purchasable housing, not just rental real estate.  The purpose of it is to be purchasable, and to change home-buyers’ expectations about what it means to “pay for” a home of your own.

Harris’s $25,000 assistance program may have visions of 3bed/2bath homes with 2-or-3-car garages and yards dancing in people’s heads.  But that’s not what she means.  It’s not what most people accessing her program are likely to get.

If your vision of home-ownership is about 700 square feet in a high-rise in a crime-infested urban area where the parks aren’t safe for your children, but that’s the only outdoor space you have:  congratulations.  You’ll get assistance buying a home there, and you can forget toting the kids around with loads of football gear or trombones.  Your expertly designed future doesn’t include having a vehicle for those extras.  Your delightful, circumscribed, “low-impact” life will be walkable, in 15 minutes or less.  Too bad if you want your kids in a parochial school you’d have to drive them to.

Kamala Harris is communicating Lima Charlie – loud and clear – what her policy is.  It’s to not bother trying to “correct” inflation, but instead to implement a social-transformation agenda as her economic policy.  She says the same thing every time, and it comes with a list of money promises reflecting her actual priorities.

She is telling you her plan.