Kamala Harris doesn’t like to talk about inflation for good reason.
As costs continue to rise well above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target in the final year of the Biden-Harris presidency, Americans are heading to the polls this fall with the incumbent administration’s economic carnage already fresh in their minds. Monday’s stock market crash was an unnecessary reminder for voters, with former President Donald Trump quick to label the election-year stress test the “Kamala crash.” Since the vice president also cast the deciding vote on legislation to encourage rising prices, Trump might as well refer to persistent inflation as “Kamalaflation,” though they seem to have tried.
For Harris, inflation and the border, the country’s two most important issues in this election, have put her vote at risk at the ballot box unless Democrats can rally an impending red wave of enough votes. The Biden administration’s “border czar” certainly can’t run against a crumbling border, and the economic situation is clearly uncomfortable for her.
Shortly after she won her party’s nomination in the wake of Biden’s victory last month, the Associated Press reported that Harris “began to develop her own narrative around the economy, focusing on ending child poverty, promoting unions, reducing health care and child care costs and protecting ‘dignity’ in retirement.”
Yet “in her speeches in Wisconsin, Indiana or Texas, she never once mentioned the word ‘inflation’ – the overwhelming economic challenge that haunts Biden’s administration and forces him to repeatedly address the plight of voters struggling with higher costs for food, gasoline, housing and cars in his speeches.”
Maybe that’s because the week President Joe Biden left office, a New York Times-Siena College poll found that only a quarter of U.S. voters believed the economy was either excellent or good, while 75 percent said the opposite. Harris, meanwhile, tried to sell the Democrats’ reckless spending sprees – the same year the administration pretended inflation was “transitory.”
“Prices have gone up, and families and individuals are having to face the reality – that bread costs more, that gas costs more,” Harris said in 2021. “And we have to understand what that means. It’s about the cost of living going up… So it’s a big issue, and we take it seriously, and so it’s a priority.”
After stating the obvious in her typically circuitous manner, Harris touted the multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan as priceless.
“Build Back Better will cost nothing,” she said. “So if we can pass Build Back Better, and we’re optimistic we can, the American people will actually see cost reductions on some of the most important services that they need to meet their basic obligations, including child care, elder care and also preschool.”
The spending package passed, and Harris cast the deciding vote on the Democrats’ questionably named Anti-Inflation Act the following year. In March 2021, she opted for a tie vote in the upper house and passed the $1.9 trillion Rescue Plan for America.
And here is what Harris said three years later in May on a “Nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour”:
That’s why I believe that every person in our country must have the opportunity to compete, to succeed, to thrive; the opportunity to achieve what I call financial freedom. That means not just having enough to get by, but having enough to get ahead — (applause) — to be able to build a business, own a home, raise a family, and create wealth for generations.
That’s why the President and I have invested trillions of dollars over the past three years in American infrastructure, in clean energy and a clean energy economy, in manufacturing and in supply chains.
However, spending trillions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize artificial markets under the guise of being “clean” while cracking down on cheap and reliable energy contributed to Monday’s “Kamala Crash.”
“Democrats have ‘normalized’ $7 trillion in federal spending a year — $2 trillion of it borrowed — all to keep their core electorate fed and happy,” the New York Post editorial board wrote this week. “That triggered steep inflation that forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and still makes it risky for the Fed to start easing rates even as it wrecks the labor market. And now, it seems, the stock market too.”
Harris is responsible for all the failures of the Biden administration, including “Bidenflation,” which can easily be renamed “Kamalaflation.”