Commie Kamala’s New Economic Policy
By George Rasley
Democrat Kamala Harris announced a new economic plan at an event in North Carolina on Friday, pledging to ban price gouging and offer new tax relief for families and homebuyers.
PBS News reported Harris promised to, during her first 100 days in office, send Congress proposed federal limits on price increases for food producers and grocers. Harris also is seeking new authority for the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in states across the country to enact steeper punishments for violators. She also wants to use government regulators to crack down on mergers and acquisitions among large food industry businesses that the vice president argues have contributed to higher prices.
To alleviate an alleged house shortage PBS reported Harris is calling for the construction of 3 million new housing units over four years, which she says will ease a “serious housing shortage in America.” She also plans to promote legislation creating a new series of tax incentives for builders who construct “starter” homes sold to first-time homebuyers.
Harris further says she can lower rental costs by limiting investors who buy up homes in bulk, as well as curbing the use of price-setting tools that she argues encourage collusion to increase profits among landlords. She also wants to expand a Biden administration plan providing $25,000 in potential down payment assistance to help some renters buy a home, so that it will include a much larger swath of first-time home buyers across the country.
The vice president also has endorsed repurposing some federal land to make room for new affordable housing, according to the PBS report.
The Financial Times reported Harris allies took to Sunday morning television shows to defend the policies, with Kentucky governor Andy Beshear telling CBS that the policies were about “making sure that capitalism stays within the guardrails”.
“This isn’t about trying to price fix, it’s just about making sure the economy is operating the way it should be,” he said.
The Democrats’ Harris Economic Plan reminds us ever so much of the old Soviet Union’s “New Economic Policy” of the 1920s in that it weirdly recognizes the necessity of free enterprise to encourage production while at the same time it promises low prices by putting bureaucrats in charge of prices and allocation.
There’s really nothing new in Harris’ version of the New Economic Policy, but just like starry-eyed Marxists claim that Communist countries fail because “real Communism has never been tried” Democrats want to give these failed redistributionist policies one more go.
And we don’t have to go back in time to the heady days of the newly collectivized Soviet Union to find those failures – we have them right here, right now in America.
Take for example government-run grocery stores.
A while back The Wall Street Journal dispatched a reporter to check out the municipal-owned grocery store in Erie, Kansas, which opened in 2021.
“Erie Market, which the city took over in 2021, is losing money almost every month amid stiff competition from a Walmart 15 miles away and a Dollar General across the street,” reported the Journal’s Joe Barrett. Erie Market posted just a single profitable month during 2022 and lost $132,000.
But like all good Marxists, city officials “aren’t giving up,” they told the Journal. Meanwhile, the store’s manager says the “goal” is to lose only $100,000 this year [2023].
You can read all about Erie Market and Chicago’s equally bad, but as yet unrealized, plan to do the same in the Windy City in this article by Eric Boehm in Reason.
The notion of putting the government in charge of housing and home construction is even worse because due to government’s inept management of public infrastructure, “public housing” has become a byword for corruption, crime and blight.
Writer Ben Austen chronicled the history of Cabrini-Green Homes, a public-housing project (named after Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini and labor leader William Green) where 23 towers, constructed between 1950 and 1962, provided 3,000 apartments. The towers came to be known almost solely for their crime and squalor.
Editor’s Note: We doubt Democrats would name anything after a Saint today, but that is another column.
William Voegeli, writing for City Journal, explained that by the time Cabrini-Green got torn down, it “had come to embody a nightmare vision of public housing,” or, as Ben Austen told an interviewer, a fixture on the “Mount Rushmore of scariest urban places in America.”
The reason that Cabrini-Green Homes failed was not lack of good intentions on the part of Chicago’s leaders. It was because, as Chicago’s then-mayor (and former Obama Chief of Staff) Rahm Emanuel observed, voters would not endorse higher safety-net spending if they plausibly believed that government couldn’t manage a “one-car parade.”
After the Clinton administration mandated a “test” of public-housing projects with vacancy rates exceeding 10 percent those judged to be too blighted for rehabilitation to be feasible were slated for demolition. By 1999 the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development would boast that it had eliminated 50,000 units of government housing nationwide; a decade later, the number doubled.
Now, after the federal government tore down over 100,000 low-income housing units, here we are again, with the Democrats meeting for their party Convention in Chicago and Kamala Harris’ ideas about public housing, that were judged a failure in the city 25-years ago, are back on the table.
We predict that, if implemented, Harris’ New Economic Plan will produce much the same results as other government-run food and housing schemes – vast sinkholes of taxpayer dollars, shortages of food and consumer products, and reeking brutalist ghettos like Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green public housing development.
George Rasley is vice-president of Conservative HQ.
Published with permission of conxervativehq.com