OPINION:
This election season, voters can blame either big government or big corporations for pernicious inflation now in a dead heat with border chaos as the issue most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race. If you are the second-highest official in big government seeking to ascend to the presidency, you’d better make damn sure voters blame big corporations.
Such is the political dynamic behind the second major strategic mistake of the nascent Kamala Harris for President campaign. The first mistake was Ms. Harris choosing a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is as far left as she is. Now, in Ms. Harris’ second strategic blunder, she has led with price controls as the solution to the inflation Ms. Harris herself has had a hand in creating.
Economically, price controls don’t work, and voters know it. In Ms. Harris’ supermarket of the future, eggs and meat may well have a posted price well below the market rate. There just won’t be enough eggs and meat to buy at the controlled prices. Instead, consumers will face shortages, queuing and black marketeering.
Politically, Ms. Harris’ price controls proposal is just a stupid gaffe, one that raises the specter of Soviet communism, California liberalism and Venezuelan socialism. Ms. Harris thus violates the cardinal rule of Nixonian politics.
To wit: Instead of running toward the Nixonian center, Ms. Harris is reinforcing a Fidel Castro stereotype that former President Donald Trump is champing at the bit to tag her with.
It gets worse. Ms. Harris’ dead-on-arrival price controls and gaffe-laden speech delivery have highlighted one of her greatest vulnerabilities: her lack of a basic understanding of economics.
Memo to James Carville: Ms. Harris is running against an opponent who has been a businessman renowned for making billions while turning entrepreneurship into a fine televised art. As president, Mr. Trump also delivered four years of near-zero inflation, rising real wages and stable growth.
Did anybody besides me and Leland Vittert notice that Ms. Harris confused “price gouging,” a well-known term of economist art, with “price gauging” — whatever that means. With that gaffe, Ms. Harris thus made clear she will misread a teleprompter anytime she delivers a speech about a topic she knows nothing about — which is to say every topic voters are most worried about.
And here’s one for the left-wing propagandist’s handbook: Both Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Google scrubbed Ms. Harris’ “price gauging” gaffe from the internet. Imagine that.
Now imagine this: By leading with her glass economics jaw, Ms. Harris has opened the door to the obvious criticism that she herself is most to blame for much of the current inflation. Indeed, much of the current inflation is of the “demand pull” type in which too much money is chasing too few goods in the U.S. economy.
As for where this “too much money” has come from, look no further than the two major budget-busting, inflation-generating pieces of legislation that Ms. Harris cast the tiebreaking votes for as president of the Senate. I’m talking about the 2021 $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and the 2022 $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act.
Did you know that Ms. Harris has cast more tiebreaking votes in the Senate (33) of any vice president in history? As the sign in the pottery store says, “you break it, you bought it.”
In Ms. Harris’ America, eggs now cost over 50% more than when Mr. Trump left office, gas is up 40%, housing is up 30%, rent is up 25% and bread is up 15%. As I said on the stage of the Republican National Convention, in Mr. Trump’s America, you didn’t have to choose between food on the table, medicine in the cabinet or a roof over your head.
As a final note on Ms. Harris’ economics speech, she made a big deal of making housing more affordable. Again, Ms. Harris illustrates her lack of understanding of the connection between today’s lack of affordable housing and her own inflation-inducing actions that have, in turn, spiked mortgage rates.
Do you see now the larger “you broke it, you bought it” problem for Ms. Harris? To win, Ms. Harris must promise voters she will solve every problem that she herself has helped create. And it’s not just runaway inflation that Ms. Harris has created.
Ms. Harris owns the border crisis — she was missing in action after President Biden designated her border czar and would decriminalize illegal immigration. Ms. Harris likewise owns the energy crisis (she’s the defracking queen of Pennsylvania), the crime crisis (she’s the “defund the police” princess of San Francisco) and international crises ranging from Gaza and Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait (Ms. Harris has the least foreign policy experience of any major presidential candidate in modern history).
Given Ms. Harris’ “you broke it, you bought it problem,” the odds are at least 50-50 that, after kicking Mr. Biden to the curb to get the nomination, she will next try to blame him at this week’s Democratic National Convention for the ills now befalling us. If voters buy Ms. Harris’ flip-flops, they will break America.
• Peter Navarro served as a senior presidential adviser to Donald Trump and is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to the Trump 2024 Platform.”
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