A Deep Dive into a Harris Word-Salad Why her handlers are keeping her sequestered from the media and voters. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-deep-dive-into-a-harris-word-salad/
Recently Larry Elder provided us with a sample of Kamala Harris’s thinking on various issues. A deep dive into one will demonstrate why her handlers are keeping her sequestered from the media and voters.
Here’s one from the year of her stillborn 2020 presidential primary, when she didn’t get a single vote, and from which she had to ignominiously withdraw:
“So, there’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, ‘oh everyone should get the same amount.’ The problem with that, not everybody’s starting out from the same place. So, if we’re all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over here, we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. It’s about giving people the resources and the support they need, so that everyone can be on equal footing, and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”
The first problem is Harris’s typical simplistic and redundant writing style. Phrases like “same place,” “back there,” “equal footing,” “equitable treatment” are vague. We assume she’s talking about socio-economic status and education, which leftists and progressives claim are products of the unjust political and economic order and “systemic” oppression. Since these are the keys to success, “resources and support,” i.e. transfers of money, or subsidized goods and services, must be provided to peoples so “we all end up in the same place” ––in other words, equality of result rather than opportunity, the fly in this word salad.
This sentiment is important, since it lies behind numerous dysfunctional leftist policies, and has been obvious in Democrats’ policy proposals since FDR, and took a quantum leap during Barack Obama’s presidency. Today, they have moved even farther left during the Biden-Harris administration, which along with Harris’s vice-president candidate Tim Walz, promise to leave centrism and common sense completely behind, damaging even further our economy and national character in the pursuit of correcting what is called “income inequality.”
This utopian delusion, moreover, fuels the redistributionist welfare state that with coercive laws and regulations, “rob selected Peter to pay collective Paul,” as Rudyard Kipling put it. As well as being toxic for our economy, these schemes are rife with moral hazards such as destroying the work ethic, reducing our freedom, creating dependence on the state, weakening families, and fostering the notion that the state is responsible for providing us not just a living, but a permanent holiday from accountability and responsibility he virtues necessary for both success and ordered liberty.
In the end, as de Tocqueville put it, radical egalitarianism “reduce men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”
Diving deeper, we find that the problem of ambitious political leaders appropriating the wealth of some voters and redistributing it to political clients, appeared at the beginning of democracy 2500 years ago in ancient Athens. Critics of what Aristotle called “extreme democracy” saw the dangers of radical egalitarianism, which “arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are free, they claim to be absolutely equal.”
Centuries later, Alexis de Tocqueville said of the United States that there were citizens with a “depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level.” Earlier, James Madison in Federalist 10 had written regarding these invidious distinctions among men: that “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties,” what he calls “factions” that are “sown in the nature of man.”
No policy or technology can rid humanity of resentment of others who are better off, or the impulse to get something for nothing.
For going on a century, we have seen this dynamic at work in our economic policies. The Democrats and progressives have focused on economic class and made “income inequality” or “social justice” the greatest crisis we face. Or as Barack Obama put it in 2013 when he decried a “danger and growing income inequality and lack of upward mobility” –– a crisis to be remedied by the federal government that can level off these “different interests and parties” by redistributing wealth and creating policies that promote the “equality of result.” That’s what Harris is alluding to when she writes, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”
Finally, the whole notion of “income inequality” is based on a statistical artifact. The census data count only cash income, and leave out the value of government transfers like food stamps, health care, the Earned Income Tax credit, and hundreds of other agencies and programs that redistribute money.
Economists Phil Gramm and John F. Early in a 2019 Wall Street Journal column explain how this slight-of-hand works: “The measure [of income] fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.”
But that’s not all: “Additionally, the census data do not include the annual $1.9 trillion redistributed to American households, mostly to the bottom quintile, 89% of whose resources come from 95 federal programs that transfer wealth. And 80% of this wealth comes from the top 10% of taxpayers. Even after taking into account the state and payroll taxes the bottom quintile pays, when these transfers are added to household income it jumps from the official $4,908 to $50,901. As Gramm and Early conclude, “America already redistributes enough income to compress the income difference between the top and bottom quintiles from 60 to 1 in earned income down to 3.8 to 1 in income received.” That’s why the statistical poor enjoy living standards higher than the average European.
In other words, “income inequality” is one of those manufactured crises that progressives “never let go to waste.” Meanwhile the real crisis of deficits, broke entitlements, and debt that result from borrowing money to keep political clients voting red, are neglected by both parties. But the Dems are the greater offenders, not just increasing and multiplying entitlements, but making policies like student-loan forgiveness and open borders whose purpose is pandering to a base constituency, and creating millions of new voters to help maintain their power.
If elected, we can count on Kamala Harris’s administration to double and triple down on this truly dangerous economic folly predicated on juked statistics and economic ignorance. She’s already talking about instituting price controls in order to fix inflation, even though it’s been tried before in the Seventies and failed. Another bad idea is continuing the stealth nationalization of health in her Medicare for All program––at a cost of $43.9 trillion. And don’t forget her plan to ban fracking, and the disastrous net-zero carbon schemes that have spent multiple billions on eliminating cheap, abundant fossil fuels.
Our country literally can’t afford an economic illiterate peddling expensive, stale leftist clichés like the inflationary $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that Kamala’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate turned to law––especially when we are critically underfunding our defense expenditure as our enemies are increasing their aggression against our security and interests.
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