The Harris populist promises are no taxes on tips, $25,000 for first-time home buyers and a federal ban on price-gouging.  Yes, if she is elected, these populist promises will have helped.  But if she wins, no they are not bloody likely to be enacted during her term(s).

Kamala Harris

They will have helped her election because their appeal to the targeted, if not pandered to, would be beneficiaries will have far outweighed the opposition to each proposal in that brief period – 70 days till November 5, 2024 – well before any serious analysis and effort, serious or otherwise, to enact them occurs.

And the no, not bloody likely, because each proposal is unsound and virtually impossible to enact in the foreseeable future, encompassing 4 to 8 years of a Harris presidency.

First, the $25,000 to first-time home buyers.  As dramatically proposed by Harris, that one is not serious.  For all first-time home buyers?  Including many millionaires we all know and even some of Bernie’s Billionaires that haven’t gone down the home buying path – really?  For Manhattanites, think of your lucky duck friends still living in rent controlled 9 room apartments that would sell for $10 million or well above.

Bernie Sanders

They’d be happy to take the $25K as a down payment for their first home, a weekend retreat.  But what about a more realistic and honest proposal that would help means tested potential first-time buyers who not only need the help but couldn’t and wouldn’t buy without it?  That far better and more realistic proposal would unleash a shitstorm of outrage from the poor first-time homeowners who begged, borrowed and thieved that amount to make their home purchase.  That storm would make the one about college loan forgiveness look and feel like a gentle spring shower in the Cotswolds.  So not gonna happen.

Then the price gouging one and specifically for food and other everyday supermarket items, as Harris has proposed.  Again, not and never to be enacted.  I am a veteran protagonist of previous state government attempts to enact such bans and to apply price gouging laws already on state statute books.

These laws were not deployed against price spikes, even when extraordinarily steep, that occur when demand greatly exceeds supply.  And when the imbalance results from supply chain disruption, war, weather, pestilence or foreign cartel activity such as OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices.  They have been applied, with limited success, in situations such as the quintupling of generator prices the day after a hurricane.  Leaving aside the assertion by many economists that even such pricing reflects normal market dynamics, which we interfere with at our peril, there is room for precisely targeted price gouging bans involving pharmaceuticals and other life saving and preserving merchandise.

But with food and most items in the weekly market basket it is an administrative nightmare to define gouging let alone enforce rules against it.  And to do it on a scale that would stabilize, let alone reduce, prices on any market-wide basis, as Harris has suggested she would do, nope.

Bill Clinton

Finally, the no tax on tips one, promised by both candidates, starts out very popular and especially among the much pandered to hospitality workers in southwestern swing states.  But as soon as legislation were enacted and probably right now, when it is merely a campaign promise, creative accountants and tax lawyers devise mechanisms to convert traditional wages and compensation into tip income for their clients and themselves.  When that reality is recognized, the no tax on tip legislation is DOA.

As unsound and quixotic as these populist plays are, I hope they help get Harris over the line.  For reasons we have spent nearly eight years chronicling in these HL posts.  They began on November 15, 2016, one week after the November 8 debacle, and substantially have been devoted to opposing virtually everything Trump is and stands for.  I admit that all that effort, though conscientious and sincere, does not come close to the most nearly perfect distillation of what Trump is and stands for given by Bill Clinton last week, when he admonished that in listening to Trump we not “count the lies [but] count the Is”.