In the run-up to the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Now many Democrats are urging that same approach with respect to electing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris: Voters have to elect her to find out what she’ll do.
You won’t find out much about her policies from the unveiling of Harris’s economic plan last Friday. It would be more accurate to call her speech an “economic platitude.” The dictionary defines a platitude as “a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one uttered as if it were fresh or profound.” And that pretty much sums up Harris’s economic plan so far.
She promised she would provide more detail in the coming months, but that may mean after the election. Politico says many Democrats would prefer she stick with her detail-free campaign.
According to Politico reporters Nicholas Wu and Daniella Diaz, Harris is “leaning into a general positive message that has wider appeal, specifically because it’s light on the details.” And they report that’s just fine with Democrats: “Democratic lawmakers call it a savvy strategy. They’d rather lay out a specific plan post-November, when a potential President-elect Harris would have to staff up her administration and determine her governing priorities.”
Get it? Don’t confuse the voters with details about how Harris would achieve all the promises she made in her speech. Better to keep the voters ignorant of any facts that might raise embarrassing questions — questions that Harris can’t answer.
There are at least three reasons why the Harris campaign is “light on the details” of her policies.
First, the generous explanation. It has been only a month since President Biden announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection and threw his support behind Harris. That’s not much time to develop a comprehensive agenda. That said, she no doubt saw Biden’s physical and mental decline better and sooner than most — though she repeatedly denied it — and surely was working behind the scenes with her closest advisers to develop a contingency plan.
Second, she has no idea how to implement all the policy platitudes she’s proposing. For example, she says she will initiate the “first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food and groceries.” But how would Harris actually impose price controls on food? Are we talking about prices at the wholesale or retail level? Can she force grocery stores to not raise their prices while ignoring the prices charged by their suppliers? Or would she target the wholesale companies that buy and process food from farmers and ranchers and sell it to the grocery stores?
And when would she implement her price-gouging restrictions? Prices often rise briefly in the wake of natural or manmade disasters, but they usually return to normal long before bureaucrats are able to act. And what if prices rise because of arbitrary shortfalls created when her union backers go on strike? For that matter, since wages are the price of labor, is it price-gouging when unions demand unreasonably high wage increases?
Even as Harris proposes to monitor and micromanage the prices of what could be thousands of food and grocery items, she claims “I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape.” But then, who is going to be monitoring nationwide grocery prices? Who’s going to decide if they’re a result of price-gouging?
Harris’s policy platitudes raise lots of other questions. She wants to expand the child tax credit from the current $2,000 per child to $3,600, and perhaps $6,000 for families with newborns. The Tax Foundation estimates that proposal would cost taxpayers $3 trillion over 10 years. How does Harris plan to pay for that proposal? With bigger federal deficits? Higher taxes? The answer is almost certainly both.
When a reporter posed that question, her answer was a rambling word-salad that made no sense with respect to the question asked.
The third and most disturbing reason Harris will be light on specifics is that she and her party need low-information voters. Informed voters ask too many questions and demand too many answers — answers this presidential candidate is not capable of providing.
For years, we’ve heard Biden, Harris and the Democratic Party whine about the growing threats to democracy. Well, one of the biggest threats to democracy is low-information voters. Now we learn that that’s exactly what Democrats want and need.
Merrill Matthews is a public policy and political analyst and the co-author of “On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff.”