One of Kamala Harris’ favorite mantras is that she stands with the middle class. She regales audiences with tales of growing up as a “middle-class kid” with a hard-working mother who saved up just enough to buy their first home when Kamala was a teenager. In this tweet, she gracefully admits that her family “wanted for little” due to her mother’s good budgeting.
What Harris fails to mention is that both of her parents were academics: her mother, a biomedical science researcher at UC Berkeley, and her father, noted economist Donald Harris, gaining tenure at Stanford University in 1972. Economic struggle was hardly at the centre of her upbringing. Her repeated claims to middle-class valor – which do not hold true for the ‘70s and ‘80s – chime with those of British Prime Minister Kier “my father was a toolmaker” Starmer. Left-wing politicians love exaggerating their childhood destitution; after all, their value systems make scapegoats of the successful and martyrs of the notionally vulnerable.
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Creating an “opportunity economy”, one in which the middle class no longer struggle with the rising cost of living, is Harris’ mission. Or so she assures us ad nauseum. Harris said she plans to implement price controls on groceries to ostensibly fix the problem of rising food costs, but this is typical of lazy lefty fiscal policy. As this insightful piece in the Financial Times summarizes:
The effects of a cap can be summarised as destroying valuable price signals, creating shortages and queues, reducing quality, hindering innovation, generating inequality between those benefiting and those not, and (for rent controls) locking people into homes, preventing them moving.
She stopped talking about this “plan” to stop price controls after an avalanche of criticism. A similar logic applies to price controls as it does to rent controls. Kill innovation and you kill the prosperity of ordinary Americans. A redundant promise to cap the price of insulin (which has been falling organically, thanks to market competition) is another of Harris’ facile pledges to help the middle class. As Forbes points out, “Harris has proposed a number of policies far to the left of anything she and Biden have tried during their three-and-a-half years in the White House”. It seems the influence of Harris’ father, whose work on “post-Keynesian economics” contributed to applied Marxist theory, is shining through.
On the immigration front, a Harris presidency would take a sledgehammer to the safety and prosperity of middle-class America. I have already discussed how Democrats refuse to listen to the objections of ordinary people when their hometowns succumb to sudden migrant inundation. A little-discussed policy of the Biden-Harris administration is the “CHNV program”, or the “Processes for Cubans, Haitian, Nicaraguans, and Vietnamese” program. It welcomes 30,000 people, per month, from these countries to enter the United States on “humanitarian parole”. The positive conditions for parole are not defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) beyond the vague phrase “urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons” which can amount to “economic motivations on the part of migrants” with no regard for the pressure this places on public services. There are some constraints on eligibility, including failure to pass national security vetting, but trafficking and fraud are already rife problems hampering the CHNV program. The Biden administration has effectively refused to detain illegal border migrants – illegal because they fail safety vetting – making those constraints practically redundant. The resources it would require to detain and deport potentially tens of thousands of migrants a month are considerable: a fact which likely contributes to this practical failure to respect the law. But that is not enough for the Democrats, whose economic short-termism and misty-eyed valorization of third-world migrants justify their immigration policy.
Putting aside the problem that Haiti currently has no government to issue legal travel documents in the first place, in the space of just fourteen months, 151,000 Haitians, 91,000 Venezuelans, 79,000 Cubans, and 64,000 Nicaraguans entered the US following the program’s inauguration (per this Centre for Immigration Studies report, also quoted above, which I urge my readers to examine closely). While the Dominican Republic strengthens its border to resist being flooded with Haitians, Americans in the Midwest are expected to keep quiet and accept the inundation. Who benefits? Americans whose neighborhoods will be changed beyond recognition by ethnic enclaves? No. The answer? NGOs like the Red Cross, Southern Poverty Law Centre, and American Civil Liberties Union who assist in processing migrants are making millions from what is quickly becoming a government-endorsed trafficking program. This report to Congress exposes the real “opportunity economy” of mass migration. With little to no record-keeping and masses of taxpayer money to process innumerous migrants at the border, NGOs have “taken over as the official travel agency of DHS”. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service received $182.6 million in grants from the government in 2022 alone. NGOs have significant lobbying influence. Harris is no stranger to the political activism of NGOs: In 2019, she tried to divert $220 million (via Bill S.388) in taxpayer funds away from ICE and towards anti-ICE advocacy groups. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the incentive structure causing the spike in mass migration.
While this policy will posture to help the “tempest-tossed” masses of the world’s most vulnerable, what will this do for America’s most needy? How will this serve the people to whom POTUS owes their allegiance, first and foremost? A liberal aka mindless migration policy has already done provable damage to a middle class already in decline: to take just one particularly sinister example, chaos at the border has directly caused the deadly fentanyl crisis to skyrocket over the last four years.
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How can Harris simultaneously back anti-ICE activism and the CHNV program, and accuse Trump of “fanning the flames of fear and division”, while promising to tackle the fentanyl crisis? She is insincere to the core.
Harris’ position on transgenderism and all its policy implications is further proof that she is out of touch with ordinary people. What normal American do you know who approves of taxpayer-funded surgeries for male prisoners who claim to be transgender women while still in prison, a policy Harris supports on record? Compare that number with the quantity of people you know – especially parents – who are concerned with the vulnerability of schoolchildren to the appeal of gender ideology (which by definition preys on body image-related insecurities). Harris, who is expected to expand Biden’s agenda for childhood transitioning, is not the candidate for them.
It is depressing that the Democrat party – a flawed but once-impressive institution – has been reduced to its current state. With a sitting President too cognitively unwell to govern, his Vice President is equally inarticulate but lacks the excuse of having dementia. Harris’ infamous word-salad is proof of the emptiness of her promises: If you can’t say anything of substance, you reveal yourself either to be lying or to be ignorant. Like Eric Weinstein, I believe Harris is more cunning than she lets on. She plausibly believes that repeating platitudes, distracting from the real issue with her almost comical blunders, and virtue-signalling about hot-topic issues will be enough to get her voters, partisan as they are, to show up to the polls. I sincerely hope that she is wrong.
