Oh, Shit -- Kamala Posted Some Policies! And I Bit the Bullet and Read Them.

Now you don't have to!

Photo by Robyn Beck via Getty.

To this point, the Harris campaign has been about as policy-dense as your typical Clifford the Big Red Dog book. That’s not entirely her fault; she was a last-minute replacement when her boss’ plan to slather makeup on his brain to make it look ten years younger somehow didn’t work. Some in the media have encouraged Harris to flesh out her plans, arguing that posting “SHE SO BRAT! 🥥🥥🥥” on Instagram does not constitute a policy platform. Yesterday, Harris gave in to this pedantic nitpicking and posted an issues page called “A New Way Forward”, probably because “A New Start” would have made people think of this Arrested Development joke:

I, for one, would not have minded being reminded of this Arrested Development joke.

What’s in Harris’ plan? Words, unfortunately. And words’ sinister cousin: numbers. This ensures that virtually no one will read the plan — even media folks who were hounding Harris about details will get bored around the time they encounter the phrase “long-term capital gains” (second paragraph) and instead write a story about the New Cold War between Taylor Swift and Brittney Mahomes.

But you and I know that we’re supposed to act like adults sometimes, so let’s dive into Harris’ proposal. Rather than just pull out some highlights, I’ll try to assess what Harris’ policies signal. Because that’s the important thing, right? A president’s agenda will always be chewed up, digested, and shat out by Congress, so most campaign proposals resemble the eventual outcome as much as seared scallops on a bed of couscous resemble a 15-inch turd in a rest stop toilet. The real question is: Is Harris promising to be a boring nobody whose robot will be stashed in the back row of Disney’s Hall of Presidents behind Chester A. Arthur, or a bold radical who will build a new nation atop a foundation of capitalist corpses? Or possibly (hopefully) some third thing? To answer those questions, I assessed her plan according to three metrics that I think signal her general orientation.

Is her economic plan Obama-ish or Warren/Sanders-y?

In my opinion, this plan panders to the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party close to the minimum amount possible. Pretty much the only things drawn from the Warren/Sanders playbook are the “billionaire minimum tax” and the grocery price-gouging thing.

The only words the plan devotes to the billionaire minimum tax are those three words: “billionaire minimum tax”. No details are given. Harris probably means Biden’s plan to tax unrealized capitalized gain at 25 percent, though she could mean the more pedestrian move of ending the step-up basis loophole. If either of those things happens — and the first almost certainly won’t, though the second might — Harris will probably say: “That was it — that was the billionaire minimum tax thing I mentioned. We did it!”

The price gouging proposal appears to have been scaled back. When Harris’ plan to deputize the FTC to lower grocery prices caused every living economist to yell “THAT’S DUMB!” loudly, in unison, over-and-over, Harris explained that actually, her big, bold plan was narrow and inconsequential. The plan described in this platform is definitely narrow: It applies only to grocers “who exploit an emergency” and “will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states”. Those statutes: 1) Usually apply only in emergencies, and 2) Often only apply to specific goods. So, basically, Harris is imagining a plan that will prevent Jimmy Dean from jacking up the price of sausage patties during a hurricane, but won’t do much else. The price gouging plan is briefly mentioned at the end of a paragraph wedged into the middle of a section that is, itself, in the middle of the document, which seems to be Harris’ way of saying: “How ‘bout we just forget about this whole thing?”

Meanwhile, the Obama-ish stuff¹ gets top billing. The Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit are mentioned in the first paragraph, i.e. the only paragraph that 97% of people who go to the web page will read. That’s immediately followed by a pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, and by the way, that section is called “Cut Taxes for Middle Class Families”. Further down, Harris backs standard Democratic priorities like raising the minimum wage, expanding health care subsidies, capping insulin prices, and letting Medicare negotiate drug prices. Her housing policy is a mix of measures aimed at expanding supply and subsidizing demand. She also includes her version of Trump’s “no tax on tips” thing, which defies categorization because it’s a weird idea dreamed up by a simpleton on a whim.

Much can be gleaned from what isn’t said. The “billionaire minimum tax” is the only thing that might be a type of wealth tax,² and even that gets the soft sell. Harris doesn’t back the rent control plan that Sanders bullied Biden into supporting just before Biden’s campaign sank beneath the waves (in a strategic master stroke for both parties). The progressive left is currently fixated on forgiving medical debt, but instead of offering a Warren-style 96-point plan to erase all medical debt from the planet, Harris vaguely promises to “work with states” to reduce medical debt. Circa-2019 nonsense like a jobs guarantee and the Green New Deal are not in this plan; instead, they are written on a notecard labeled “things of which we shall never speak”, which has been encased in cement and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Does this plan represent big-ass change or fine tuning?

Here’s the reality: The Biden administration shot our National Wad jolting us out of Covid and making long-delayed investments. Personally, I am glad that he did those things — I think they needed to be done. But now, we are in a National Refractory Period, and we need to kill some time making a sandwich and watching a Seinfeld rerun before we can even think about spending again.

Harris’ plan tacitly acknowledges this. It contains no FDR-style grand plans; Harris’ presidency will only be “transformational” if she literally turns into a semi truck like Optimus Prime. Instead of outlining big plans that will win plaudits from lefty Twitter (for ten minutes before they go back to accusing her of genocide), Harris frequently opts to say that she’ll “tackle” an issue or “fight for” an outcome. Some will see this as a dodge; I see it as telling us what she’d like to do without making grandiose promises that she won’t be able to keep. It’s already true that 60-80 percent of what Harris calls for in her plan won’t happen because of Congress and the courts; personally, I don’t think we need her to produce phone book-thick white papers that do nothing but increase her political liabilities.

I think that a mild indication that Harris understands our budget situation can be found in her section on Social Security and Medicare. She says she’ll “strengthen and protect” the programs, and that she’ll “fight to ensure that Americans can count on getting the benefits they earned.” And that’s what I’d expect any Democrat to say. But Harris doesn’t go above and beyond to forswear cuts, which liberals have been known to do — we’ll wag a finger and say “If one solitary penny is cut, then you can light me on fire at the Super Bowl halftime show and feed my ashes to pigs!” Of course, the reality is that we’ll probably have to accept modest cuts to future beneficiaries as part of a deal to keep the programs solvent. The fact that Harris doesn’t fall all over herself denouncing cuts suggests that she understands that.

Is the plan woke or not woke?

This platform is not woke. If Harris had proposed this platform in 2020, there would not have been enough papier-mâché in the world to make all the giant “Kamala the Klanswoman” puppets that lefty protesters would have wanted to make of her.

Harris’ immigration section is 190 words long, and 185 of those words are about tougher enforcement; a passing mention of “an earned pathway to citizenship” are the five oddball words. Also, did you know that Kamala used to be a prosecutor? You will if you get within a hundred yards of this platform, because it’s mentioned in the sections on immigration, drugs, crime, energy, civil rights, housing, and health care. Those same sections are carpeted with words like “tough”, “strong”, “action”, “protect”, “secure”, and “lethal” — the Harris campaign did everything short of writing a section called “Kamala Harris’ Penis is Robust, Tenacious, and Feared By Our Enemies”.

Harris doesn’t call for a fracking ban — she cheers the record energy production that happened under Biden. She doesn’t call for defunding the police — she brags about the $15 billion that the Biden administration gave to local law enforcement. Harris doesn’t call for cutting off Israel — she says she will “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself” (and also says that she and Biden are trying to negotiate an end to the war). Harris is still definitely a Democrat — I’m cherry-picking stuff that indicates which way she’s leaning and leaving out Democratic boilerplate that could have been lifted from the Mondale campaign. But the woke/not woke question has divided the party for years, and with this platform, Harris is staking out territory on the “not woke” side of the party.

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You might not buy Harris’ pivot to the center; you might figure this is how politicians always approach the general election. And that’s fair enough; I confess that while I was reading Harris’ platform, there were several times when my position was to the left of hers, and I thought “yeah but I don’t really believe you.” It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s platform does not court the center — it’s written for a Fox News audience, and is, itself, a moderated version of the shockingly extreme Project 2025. That represents a choice, and these choices tell us something about how the candidates might govern. This platform suggests to me that Harris is trying to leave her 2020 run behind; she’s trying to seek out…well, there’s really no other way to say it:

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1. Some of this is ALSO Warren/Sanders style stuff. There’s overlap in that Venn diagram.

2. Whether you consider this a wealth tax depends on your definition of wealth. Personally, I don’t consider it to be a wealth tax, because I view an asset’s principal as wealth and capital gains as income. But others disagree.