Several weeks ago, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris finally released a list of policy issues that she said she would fight for if elected president. One does not have to read much about her policy proposals to see that she is no longer hiding her hard-line leftist ideological ambitions.
It is easy to criticize left-leaning policies on their ideological merits, but it is just as necessary—if not more—to pinpoint the flawed economics that goes into something so blatantly ideological as Harris’s policy platform.
She has centered her economic policy ideas around the concept of “opportunity economy.” As is usually the case in politics when candidates merrily employ ill-defined slogans, it is impossible to find any publication—by Kamala Harris or her campaign—that nails down what an “opportunity economy” actually is.
Or, to be more precise: she has thus far failed to explain how her opportunity-based economy is different from the opportunity-based economy that currently exists in America.
Since the Harris campaign does not define the term, our only hope to rein it in semantically is to comb through the actual policy proposals on the “Issues” page of her campaign website. Since the “opportunity economy” is prominently mentioned there, we can safely assume that those policy proposals are in some way meant to give content to her lead policy slogan.
Unfortunately, a review of her policy ideas brings us no closer to a workable definition of the opportunity economy. Most of what it contains could easily be sorted under America’s already existing welfare state. Just like it, Harris’s policy ideas want to take America further in the leftist direction.
A representative example is the return to the $3,600 child tax credit—almost twice the current level—that was handed out by Congress during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic. There is also the proposal for a supplemental child tax credit of $6,000 “to families with newborn children.”
Both of these would ostensibly come with the same kind of eligibility structure that the current child tax credit does. This means that a family cannot qualify for them unless their taxable income is below a certain level. Since that level happens to be $200,000, very few families will fail to qualify for it. Therefore, from a structural viewpoint, the two child-tax credit ideas that Kamala Harris has proposed would de facto work like universal benefits.
Read more at Europeanconservative.com
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