Vice President Kamala Harris got one thing right in her speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday.
“The American economy is the most powerful force for innovation and wealth creation in the world,” Harris said. “We just need to move past the failed policies that we have proven don’t work.”
True enough. We need to move past the proven failure of the past four years’ economic policies. Harris is the presidential candidate who has been in power during those years, and there is a reason voters want a change in direction.
MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who supports Harris for president, touched on this problem in a follow-up interview with Harris, asking the vice president what she would tell the majority of voters who believe former President Donald Trump would handle the economy better than she would.
In response, Harris flat-out lied, claiming Trump “left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression” and had lost “at least 200,000” manufacturing jobs before COVID-19. As noted by many news outlets, including some left-wing ones such as CNN, that is just false. Trump presided over a gain of 414,000 manufacturing jobs before COVID-19 hit, more than double the less than 200,000 jobs created under President Joe Biden from the pre-pandemic peak.
Harris did not mention Biden during her speech, and it is understandable why. By almost every metric, the Trump economy was better than the current Biden-Harris reality. Gas prices were lower, inflation-adjusted household incomes were higher, savings were higher, credit card balances and defaults were lower, and housing was more affordable.
On housing, Harris promised in her speech “to cut the red tape that stops home from being built,” adding in her interview that “looking holistically at the connection between [transit] and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.”
Harris’s sudden interest in “holistic” policy sounds similar to the babble of a new-age health nut. But set it aside, and the fact is that Harris has a bad record of tying up home construction with red tape and making it more difficult. Where Trump promised and delivered two regulations cut for every new one created, the Biden-Harris administration has done the opposite, piling a record high $1.7 trillion in new federally regulatory costs on the economy.
Harris went on to complain that “projects take too long to go from concept to reality,” noting that the Empire State Building was constructed in a year and the Pentagon was built in 16 months. She then called for “permitting” reform to “get things moving faster.”
But again, her record, rather than her rhetoric on permitting reform, is a bad one. When Trump was president, he took executive action to streamline and minimize compliance costs associated with the National Environmental Policy Act. When Biden and Harris took power, one of their first acts was to undo those reforms. So, instead of reforming federal permitting to “get things moving faster,” Harris made them worse.
There is a reason Harris does so few interviews and does them only with ardent supporters such as Oprah Winfrey and Ruhle. It is the same reason the Biden campaign minimized the number of interviews he did. It is that both are bad at it, although for different reasons.
Biden’s brain is cooked. He barely knows where he is, let alone what he is talking about. Every interview he gave reinforced this perception.
Harris is simply a lightweight who, because she has no idea what she is talking about, spouts nonsense such as, “We have to guard that spirit. Let it always inspire us. Let it always be the source of our optimism, which is that spirit that is uniquely American. Let that then inspire us by helping us to solve the problems.”
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It’s a fluffy cumulus cloud enveloping a vague notion. It certainly cannot convey meaning or inspire admiration.
Harris is a terrible communicator trying to trick voters into forgetting who has been in power for the last four years. Media figures such as Winfrey and Ruhle are doing their best to help her. Voters should not fall for it this November.