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Saturday, September 14, 2024

Harris changes positions to attract votes and avoids interviews


September 10, 2024

It has frequently been pointed out how the Biden-Harris administration has messed up so much during its tenure, and that Vice President Kamala Harris, as a candidate for president, has said so often that if elected she will fix things. A comment often follows, asking why she doesn’t fix things now, since she is in power.

Some of the problems she wants to fix to encourage votes in November are items that she previously supported. Among those areas, we find these flip-flops:

**On illegal Immigration, Harris wrote in 2020 that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.” She further called it “un-American.” As “border czar” she did nothing to control the influx of illegal aliens. However, she now has endorsed spending hundreds of millions of dollars on construction of a wall, according to The Daily Signal.

**She also campaigned against oil and natural gas fracking, saying in 2020, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Very recently, however, she said, “What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,”

**And while during the Biden-Harris administration a regulation came from the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation that mandates electric vehicle sales in the United States, her view on that, too, has changed. Her campaign recently announced that she “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”

**As a U.S. senator from California, Harris favored government-run healthcare by co-sponsoring the Medicare for All legislation. But, once again, that is not her current position.

But while back-tracking on previous positions to seem less radical, Harris supports other policies that are radical and harmful.

During the anti-police riots following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Harris supported defunding the police. “This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said, praising Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget.

Harris favors assisting more than 4 million people over four years to combat the country’s unaffordable housing crisis by providing an average of $25,000 to all first-time homebuyers. Quite a price tag: $100 billion.

“Shark Tank” star and O’Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O’Leary has criticized this "crazy notion," on the Fox Business program, “Kudlow.” 

He argued that "$25,000 free helicopter money is insane" and will "never happen." "Think about it. You have a shortage. You then flush more helicopter money from the sky. You cause inflation because if you're the seller of a house and you've got 15 bids and you know that person has just received $25,000, you up your price 25,000, the price just went up," he stressed.

He added that the country has "massive supply" problems and "punitive" regulatory policies must be addressed to "get more supply on the market."

O’Leary also criticized Harris’ proposed solution to rising rental costs, which is to impose price controls. Calling it a “Soviet-style pricing" fix, he said, "There’s a huge problem with that."

"Here's what happens to the price control building,” he continued. “No CapEx [Capital Expenditures], no maintenance. It starts to fall apart. There's no incentive for the landowner or the person who built the building to ever spend another dime on it. They just slowly crumble." Price controls distort markets, cause inflation, and reduce supply, he said.

In what may well be the craziest of these ideas, Harris proposes to raise taxes. In her campaign for president, she supports all the tax increases President Biden proposed in the White House fiscal year 2025 budget. First, she wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, increasing costs on businesses, which leads to higher prices.

But the wildest idea to impose a 25 percent tax on unrealized capital gains for people with over $100 million in wealth. Currently, taxpayers pay taxes on the growth in the value of their assets when they are sold, and money is in hand. "Of all the suggestions I’ve heard on taxation, I find that the most offensive," O’Leary said, calling it “un-American.”

"Let's say our business went from being worth 10 million to 20 million over five years. Where am I going to come up with $3 or $4 million cash that I don't even have, that I never had? I mean when you really start thinking pragmatically about these ideas, you understand how bad they are," he said, adding that it "makes no sense whatsoever."

Like many Democrats, Harris does not like the Second Amendment. As the district attorney for San Francisco she supported restrictions on individual gun rights, and in the 2019 campaign supported a “mandatory buyback program” for the government to confiscate firearms.

As Harris still has not done interviews or released a list of her policies, some of these may be dropped and others added. 

We may not know what policies will become part of the campaign, but we can feel confident that there will be more restrictions and pain on the American people, and they will strengthen the radical left’s control over us. 

Watching Kamala Harris today, Karl Marx would be proud.

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