Biden's selection of Harris for VP means disastrous San Francisco economic model could go nationwide
The Democrat Party's lunge to the far-left is near completion
The Democrat party’s lunge to the far-left is near completion with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s pick of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate on Tuesday.
She is very much a San Francisco Democrat who assumes more and more obtrusive government rules, mandates and taxes are never enough.
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Her run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 (she dropped out in December) demonstrated that she has neither the beliefs nor the backbone to counter her party’s embrace of socialism.
Here she will be a collaborator, not a resister.
Harris was born in Oakland, California. What has happened in the Bay Area to San Francisco—suffocating taxes, subpar schools, rising crime, evermore-unaffordable housing, increasing homelessness accompanied by aggressive panhandling, feces on the sidewalks, destructive hostility to small businesses, a never-ending array of annoying, busybody rules and mandates—is a frightening model for what lies ahead for the rest of America if the Biden-Harris ticket wins.
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The U.S. economy will be in for a debilitating period of stagnation. Here’s why.
Taxes will go up big time. Top tax rates on many high-income earners, for instance, will exceed 50%, hurting capital creation.
The capital gains levy will reach levels not seen since the 1970s, a dreadful decade for innovation and productive investment (only when the rate was cut did American high-tech begin to blossom).
What has happened in the Bay Area to San Francisco—suffocating taxes, subpar schools, rising crime, evermore-unaffordable housing, increasing homelessness accompanied by aggressive panhandling, feces on the sidewalks, destructive hostility to small businesses, a never-ending array of annoying, busybody rules and mandates—is a frightening model for what lies ahead for the rest of America if the Biden-Harris ticket wins.
Their proposed higher corporate taxes will start to send companies and capital overseas, hurting American workers and damaging American manufacturing.
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What the Bidens and Harrises of the world can’t grasp is that without vigorous private sector investment, the economy goes nowhere but down.
On health care, Harris is even more radical than Biden. At one point during her run for the White House, she came out in favor of Medicare-for-all (then she backtracked a bit, sort of).
More government control of health care will mean rationing care for patients as is the norm in Europe and Canada. And it will be the death knell for life-saving and quality-of-life enhancing medical breakthroughs. Forget about more sustained progress against cancer and finding breakthroughs against dread diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
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Harris, like Biden, is a big believer in more regulation. She supports the Green New Deal, which will mean a plague of corrupt cronyism as Washington doles out multi-billion dollar subsidies and tax credits for favored purveyors of “alternative” energies, not to mention strangling the one truly clean and cheap energy source, natural gas.
Harris also would upend efforts by the FCC to streamline 5G deployment, which would be a boon for China’s aggressive efforts to be the leader in this crucial area. She favors other measures that would hobble high-tech progress.
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Harris is a supporter of a national $15 an hour minimum wage, a misguided move that would swell small business costs—not to mention making many of them insolvent. This would hold back the creation of entry-level jobs for young people and low-skill workers.
Experience repeatedly demonstrates that bigger government means less room for truly creative inventors and innovators—which means living standards suffer. The domestic repercussions of snuffing out hope for a better future could be ugly indeed.
And the world will become a far more dangerous place with an America that seems to be in terminal decline.
Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Forbes Media.