Kamala Harris promises to supercharge house prices with misguided $25,000 home buyers grant
The likely future US president has promised to impose on Americans one of Australia’s worst economic policies ever – the disastrous First Home Buyers Grant – to rapturous applause, a few days before her coronation as the Democratic Party’s saviour.
The possible, likely even, future president of the United States, Kamala Harris, has promised to impose on Americans one of Australia’s worst economic policies ever, the disastrous First Home Buyers Grant, to rapturous applause a few days before her coronation as the Democratic Party’s saviour kicks off at the party’s four-day nominating convention in Chicago on Monday (Tuesday AEST).
In a trademark powder blue power suit a beaming vice president Harris strode onto the stage about 15-minute drive outside Raleigh, North Carolina capital on Friday afternoon (Saturday AEST) to deliver her first major economic address, before an intimate and carefully curated group of supporters.
“I do strongly believe this election is about two very different visions, one, our focus on future, and the other focus on past” Harris declared, hammering Donald Trump’s signature policy to lift tariffs on imports, which would amount to a “national sales tax on everything”, she said.
“It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs: a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication,” she warned, the makings of a campaign line that Labor once used in Australia in 2001, almost destroying John Howard’s government over the GST.
The time and locations differ but the same arguments emerge keep popping up.
The well-oiled Democrat party machine was purring at the Hendricks Automotive Centre of Excellence on Friday, where the party faithful practised its standing ovations as enthusiastic young volunteers ushered no more than 200 supporters to their seats.
A month ago the party was facing a landslide loss in November under Joe Biden; now bookies are giving Harris a near 55 per cent chance of defeating a man who only a month ago was thought to be politically invincible after his brush with death in Pennsylvania at the hand of would-be assassin.
Ms Harris, Democrat party nominee for president for not yet four weeks, was seeking on her 16th visit to North Carolina as VP to reject Trump’s caustic criticism that she had no platform, days after she brazenly pinched his promise to end income tax on tips.
Trump, who held a rally in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday, has rubbished Harris’s platform as the “Maduro plan” in a reference to the socialist Venezuelan leader.
“I’m much better looking person than Kamala,” the former president said at least twice during his remarks in the critical battleground state, which like North Carolina, is a “must-win” for both sides in November.
It’s an election campaign that’s seen some of the most economically foolish policies ever proposed in a US presidential campaign. Both sides appear oblivious of the fact that Washington is borrowing $US1 trillion every 100 days, enough to hit $US36 trillion by election day on November 5.
The Trump campaign has promised slash taxes further as the federal budget blows out and crank up tariffs, potentially triggering a global trade war, as president Herbert Hoover did in 1930.
But at least Trump hasn’t yet embraced a home-buyers grant, which Australia debuted under Howard in 2000, foreshadowing years of world-beating house price growth.
The Biden-Harris administration has presided over the most rapid house-price growth in modern US history (about 30 per cent since 2020). Now Democrats have taken inspiration from Australia, it seems, promising first-home buyers $US25,000 each, should Harris emerge as America’s first female president.
That populist idea, which pushes up prices and tends to enrich retiring, downsizing boomers, was just one offering on the smorgasbords of economic nonsense Ms Harris unveiled on Friday afternoon in a speech that could easily have appeared in Veep, the US TV sitcom Veep.
Harris cooed repeatedly that she would deliver an “opportunity economy”. She would deliver “A New Way Forward”, and, of course, cut “unnecessary red tape” and usher in “broad based growth”.
“To see an African American woman reach the presidency in this country, which her ancestors built, is a wonderful thing,” Regenia Melvin, a retired breast cancer survivor, told me after the talk.
“I would not be in a good place if my health insurance denied me for pre-existing conditions”.
A Harris-Walz administration, Harris revealed, would also cap prescription drug costs, introduce the first ever legislation to stop “price gouging on food”, whatever that means, and more than double a child tax credit to $6,000 a year per child.
“Many of the big food companies are seeing their highest profits in decades, and while many grocery chains pass along these e savings… some are not, and we need to take action in that case,” Harris said before not more than 200 fans.
Even a Democrat-friendly Washington Post columnist slammed the proposal to stamp out ‘gouging’ as politically and economically stupid. “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” the paper’s chief economics writer said on Friday. “Has Harris given substance to Trump’s charge the Democrats are ‘communist’?”
Indeed, it’s back to the failed policies of the 1970s, which appear to crop up whenever inflation spikes: blame ‘greed’ and ‘nasty corporations’ rather than governments, which massacred supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic and pumped trillions of new dollars into the economy.
Some voters aren’t buying it but in an election about ‘values’ policy details matter little. Rob Hanrahan, a 35-year-old local software salesman, didn’t believe either party’s rhetoric about lowering prices but felt Democrats were “better for helping the average citizen”, and disliked Donald Trump.
“Corporations are having record profits and it needs to be address in some way,” he told me.
Indeed, the https://kamalaharris.com/ still has no policies listed as of today.
Harris is the favourite to win in November without even giving a single interview or press conference, on the back of a surge in Democratic Party enthusiasm and alongside a largely obsequious mainstream media.
The Democratic Party convention next week in Chicago, which will see the Clintons, Joe Biden and Barack Obama take the stage, will trigger further rounds of hagiography that should sustain Harris’s political honeymoon well into early September, ahead of her one and only scheduled debate with Trump on September 10.
“She talked about the middle class; she comes from a working class background herself so she can identify with people, she brings hope back because people have lost hope,” Surluta Anthony, a councillor from Monroe, told me.
Th upper middle-class daughter of a Stanford economics professor from Jamaica and a biomedical scientist mother from India, the Democratic Party has indeed been selling Harris as working class ‘girl boss’, whose accent often inexplicably veers southern on the stage.
Every song bar one that blared over the sound system to gee up the crowd was by a black artist such as Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and Beyonce.
Kelly Patricof, who leads a California not for profit that helps low income parents care for their babies, told me Harris had “amazing charisma and has become more and more polished and tightened up her policy”.
“She’s going to she’s going to tackle child poverty, she’s talking about the cost of food and diapers, it will be amazing for families,” Patricof, who had flown in from California to watch Harris, added.
Outside, the atmosphere turned awkward as the crowd dispersed.
Two dozen odd angry pro-Palestinian protesters had set up camp right beside a stall selling Harris T-shirts, yelling very loudly over a megaphone that Harris was a war criminal.
“How is she going to deal with this?” one young Hispanic undergraduate university student, who said he’d be voting for Trump asked me, refusing to give me his name for fear he’d put his position on the student council in jeopardy.
With a little over 80 days to go until polling day, Harris’s path far from guaranteed.
My Uber driver to the event, Israel Markovitz, a cigar retailer and wholesaler who voted for Democrats in 2016 and 2020, said he wouldn’t be voting for Harris.
“Everything that I’ve seen since she’s been VP I don’t think she’s presidential, doesn’t have the capacity, and it just bothers me when I hear her saying she’s doing to do all these things on day 1 when she’s basically the president now,” he told me.
Aren’t you worried about the ‘threats to Democracy’, I asked? “No, because he was already in office for four years and our democracy is still in tact”.
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