The economic “plan” that Harris rolled out yesterday is a nightmare.  Said the Washington Post editorial board:

The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.

And that, frankly, is being kind.  Here is the outline of plan as released by the campaign.  Here is some analysis from more conservative outlets – National Review and the Washington Times.  My most straightforward analysis is that Harris thinks she can dictate to the economy how to behave.  She honestly thinks POTUS has god-like power.

She proposes a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries,” read that “price controls.”  How well did that work for Nixon, or the Soviet Union for that matter?  Rush Limbaugh used to tell the story over and over and over again about how when he worked in a butcher and Nixon said the price of chuck roast was controlled to $X, chuck roast suddenly became a “shoulder roast,” which was not controlled.  The Soviet Union does not exist anymore – ’nuff said.

Her plans for healthcare are laughable.  Capping the price of insulin? – see preceding paragraph.  “She will increase competition and demand transparency in the health care industry….”  Whoa – back up the truck here just a minute.  Wasn’t it Obamacare that created this uncompetitive opaque mess?  Yeah, I think it was – so we are going to compound that thousands of pages of law and regulation with more law and regulation – really?  Won’t that just increase opacity?  And this, “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will also work with states to cancel medical debt for millions of Americans,” is, like Biden’s continuing cancellation of student loan debt, an insult to those of us that actually pay our bills.  Next time I get a bill from the doc, I’ll be sure and forward it to her campaign office.

Oh, and speaking of outright giveaways, this – “the Harris-Walz plan starts to expand the supply of entry-level homes, they will, during their first term, provide working families who have paid their rent on time for two years and are buying their first home up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.”  That’s just insulting to every homeowner that has preceded them everywhere.

I could go on like this for a while, but in sum what she has proposed is red tape to try and control mistakes created by red tape.  Rather than release too tight government control, she proposes to add more government control.  She proposes to grow government like the most virulent cancer known to mankind.  It’s a nightmare, particularly if you consider the other federal regs that would have to be folded into this mess.  Let’s go through some examples.

James Carville is on the wrong side of the aisle, but he isn’t stupid, at least I did not think he was – until this:

Veteran Democratic Party strategist James Carville claimed that Republicans are more likely to be pro-Israel than Democrats because Jews have a lighter complexion than their Arab neighbors.

Now, at 79, it is possible Carville is joining Biden in age-related cognitive impairment, but I think revealed here is what has become a Democratic obsession with race, and in particular picking winners and losers among the races.  Imagine all those rules and regulations Harris/Walz proposed yesterday run through a filter of racial concern and preference.  You can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as more white people are getting that $25K than black people, something will change to make it even more complicated.

Out of California comes a story of Emperor, er Governor Newsom “solving” the crime problem running rampant there.  I just loved this, “The legislation allows prosecutors to combine the value of items stolen from different victims across various counties to help meet the threshold for felony grand theft and enforce harsher penalties for smash-and-grabs and large-scale reselling operations.”  Dear Lord.  This makes it easier?  So now, instead of prosecuting a single crime, that was decriminalized at Democratic insistence, the poor prosecutor now has to convict the accused of multiple crimes across multiple jurisdictions.  You see the game that is being played here?  Add bureaucracy to “solve” problems created by bureaucracy.  Aren’t we forgetting the definition of insanity?

And finally this,

The EPA continues taking down American businesses for what it calls violations of the Clean Air Act, the latest one being a small Ford dealership in Nebraska. While billionaires are shooting rockets into space, planning missions to Mars, and building EVs with batteries that require devastating mining practices abroad, the EPA has taken it upon itself to ensure small American businesses know who’s boss.

At least this time federal regulators didn’t nuke the business into oblivion with fines and such, something they’ve done and celebrated repeatedly. According to a US Department of Justice official press release, Moddy Motor Co. of Niobrara, Nebraska forked over a $39,741.95 fine and is on a one-year probation period after getting busted for selling tuners and delete kits for diesel trucks.

I could tell you this story over and over and over again, just with different regs and agencies.  The bigs have the resources to fight back against the agencies and so any actions the agencies take against them get tied up in court and take years, even decades, to resolve.  But the agencies have to show results.  So they go hang the small fry and then they can create statistical reports showing how effective they are not being.

So, let’s circle back to Harris economic plan.  There is this:

Stop Wall Street Investors from Buying Up and Marking Up Homes in Bulk. Community after community feels taken advantage of by Wall Street investors and distant landlords. Vice President Harris is calling on Congress to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act, to curtail these practices by removing key tax benefits for major investors who acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes.

It’s not “Wall Street” that’s gonna take it in an unpleasant place here – nah.  Wall Street is going to hire an army or two of lawyers and tie this nonsense up, but little guys, either the well-heeled individual that buys say a block of homes, or the small private equity REITS that can’t afford that army, are in trouble.  There are no numbers proposed here, so we’ll be arbitrary.  Let’s say you have worked hard all your life and acquired a few rental homes – say 10.  They are in a low rent neighborhood, and they produce little to modest income for you but provide tremendous tax advantages on your income from your primary source of income.  So, what they are proposing here is to eliminate those tax advantages.  What are you going to do?  Either you are going to sell the homes (to someone likely to raise the rent) and look for a different tax shelter, or you are going to raise the rent.

It is quite clear that no one on the Harris/Walz team has ever read a book or done anything practical in their entire life.  They are compounding problems with more problems.  They do not know how to do things – they know only how to create more and more and more bureaucracy – dragging the economy lower and lower and lower.