Pirate's Cove

Will the Fish Wrap, er, NY Times, come to the real conclusion?

Harris Had a Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch. It Fell Flat.

When Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to a locally owned brewery in New Hampshire to talk about helping small businesses — a major plank of her economic platform — she made sure that one group of Americans felt included: millionaires who wanted to keep more of their profits from selling stocks and real estate.

“If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28 percent under my plan,” Ms. Harris said in that campaign speech this fall. “Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth.”

The moment stuck out. In remarks that her campaign had pitched as a major address to the middle class, Ms. Harris offered a striking concession on tax rates for the wealthy — an olive branch that she used to present herself as more business friendly than President Biden, who had sought a higher rate.

Raising the capital gains tax is a striking concession? How does raising the rate incentivize investment? She is an idiot, or, at least her puppeteers are.

Her speech underscored just how much the advice of her allies and donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley — as well as her own longstanding belief in pragmatic, incremental progress over sweeping, ideological change — was driving her messaging on the economy.

If the big money folks on Wall Street liked the plan, you know there were measures that would see them make a boatload of money. You know, the people who were dropping big money on her campaign. Seriously, this is giving me deja-vu for something I wrote on Hillary Clinton way back in the day, but, I’m not going to slog through at least 210 Hillary Clinton posts, but, really, she talked of raising taxes while taking lots of money from the Elites. Obama as well. Maybe the post was on him? Or both?

Mr. West, who served as a top Justice Department official in the Obama administration but has little background in economic policy, also flagged social media posts from her campaign and official accounts that he thought were off Ms. Harris’s economic message, one of the people said. He and Brian Nelson, a longtime adviser to Ms. Harris, were in frequent contact with business executives and Wall Street donors during the campaign.

Anyone else getting the idea she listened to her rich donors and uber-Progressive wackjob supporters but not the working and middle classes?

The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Ms. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.

It was, to put it bluntly, a shitshow, and voters knew it. They knew her whole “price-gouging” schtick was BS and a means to patronize what she thought were stupid voters. I think a lot of voters realized that Kamala was an empty suit who treated the working and middle classes with derision on a wide variety of issues. And that the Democrat party has been doing this.

Voters ultimately preferred Donald J. Trump’s broad but vague promises to cut taxes and shake up the global trading system. And as frustration with the historic increase in inflation has led to losses among governing parties across the world, some Democrats doubt that Ms. Harris could have prevailed even with a stronger economic message.

She had to have a realistic plan to have a real message. People saw what Trump did his first term before COVID hit, so, he didn’t have to lay it out. Anyhow, this is a long piece that does, in fact, touch on the fact that her so-called policies stunk and drove people to Trump. No one trusted her. And no one wants to be treated as a dunce. Telling us that Wall Street approved of the message didn’t actually help with her Democrat voting base, either, because they hate Wall Street.

Read: NY Times Wonders Why Kamala’s Wall Street Approved Economic Fell Flat »