f you were hoping that one of President Joe Biden’s worst ideas, instituting a national rent-control policy for corporate-owned housing, died along with his presidential campaign, we have some bad news for you. It has been resurrected by Vice President Kamala Harris.
At her first major economic address on Friday in North Carolina, Harris unveiled proposals on everything from grocery prices, to child tax credits, to housing. At every turn, the only way Harris diverges from Biden’s failed economic plans is to make them worse.
In addition to reviving his rent-control plan, which would discourage new housing construction and thus push housing prices higher, Harris doubled Biden’s proposed $20 billion grant program to “help local governments develop innovative solutions to the lack of housing supply.”
Local governments don’t need Biden’s $20 billion or Harris’s $40 billion to “develop innovative solutions” to bring down housing prices. The solution is simple: remove regulations that make building new homes more expensive. That is what Texas has done, and housing construction is booming. All $40 billion will do is enrich Democratically aligned nonprofit groups, part of the point, which will waste the money on consultants and executive pay without helping anyone afford a new home.
Finally, Harris will take a $10,000 tax credit for “first-time homebuyers,” first proposed by Biden, and more than double it to $25,000. Leaving aside the inequity of giving the credit only to “first-time homebuyers,” the policy does nothing to induce the construction of new homes. All it does is subsidize demand for existing homes. Under Biden’s proposal, all existing homeowners would see the value of their homes increase by $10,000, which would make them much more unaffordable. Harris’s policy would more than double that inflation to $25,000. It’s the economic illiteracy of Biden on steroids.
Read more at Washingtonexaminer.com
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