Kamala Harris's economy will be even worse than Biden's

If Americans think Joe Biden’s economy’s bad, then just wait ‘til they get Kamala Harris's economy. 

Over the last four years, Biden’s excessive spending has helped stoke the inflation inferno that has consumed average Americans’ paychecks. But as big as Biden has spent, Harris wants to spend even bigger. Not simply dependent on the extreme left, as Biden has been, Harris is one of them and brings their spending priorities with her.

Outside a -58 percent last in April 2022, that’s its lowest level since December 2023 — even lower than during the pandemic and a level not seen since the Financial Crisis in 2009. Unsurprisingly, Real Clear Politics’ average of national polling gives Biden just a 38.6 percent approval rating on the economy. 

No wonder Americans are dissatisfied with the Biden-Harris economy: They’re worse off than they were four years ago. And no wonder they link Biden-Harris to inflation: This administration helped provoke it, and it’s continued without interruption throughout its tenure.

Congressional Budget Office data show the Biden-Harris appending explosion. Spending soared with COVID, but under Biden-Harris, it essentially stayed at crisis-response levels. During fiscal 2021 through 2024, CBO projects this administration will spend $5.9 trillion over pre-pandemic 2019 levels and run deficits of $7.7 trillion.

This excessive spending, on top of the historic stimulus the Fed was providing, began spurring inflation immediately after Biden-Harris took office. In January and February 2021, The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) remained subdued, registering 1.4 percent and 1.7 percent annual rate increases. In March, it was 2.6 percent; by December, it was 7 percent.  

In 2022, inflation climbed even higher, hitting 9.1 percent in June; by December it was still at 6.5 percent. Throughout 2023, inflation never dropped below 3 percent — not doing so until July 2024, when it hit 2.9 percent. Even this remains well above the Fed’s 2 percent target level — and has for 41 consecutive months. 

Yet Harris has even bigger spending aspirations than Biden.

In the Senate, Harris cosponsored the Green New Deal. Even among the lefties vying for the Democrats’ 2020 nomination, Harris was the first to support it. When former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eagin estimated the Green New Deal’s cost for the Aspen Institute in 2019, he projected a ten-year price tag between $52 trillion and $93 trillion. 

For comparison, the entire U.S. GDP in 2023 was $27 trillion. So, the Harris-backed Green New Deal’s 10-year cost would have ranged between twice and four times the annual U.S. GDP. And that 2019 cost estimate is undoubtedly an underestimate. After four years of Biden-Harris inflation, the cost would be substantially higher now. 

The Green New Deal is hardly a one-off for Harris. During her brief Senate tenure, she introduced legislation just short of a basic universal income proposal.  

According to an American Enterprise Institute article by Matt Weidinger, her bill, the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act”  “proposes monthly payments of $2,000 for most Americans through the pandemic and beyond,” adding that “the vast majority of Americans would qualify for monthly checks, and for them, Harris’s bill amounts to the most generous universal basic income proposal ever introduced in Congress.”

Nor do these gargantuan Harris spending proposals include the other ways she could hurt America’s economy. As Biden has shown through repeated attempts to unilaterally cancel student loan debt, executive action can cost plenty. So too, actions that would undercut American energy production, like Harris’s commitment to ban fracking.

Nor is Harris’ big spending a thing of her past. Her latest economic plan is filled with economics so bad that even the Washington Post panned her pandering.

Bidenflation has hurt Americans for four years with prices almost 20 percent higher than when Biden took office. Interest rates (which Biden-Harris inflation forced the Fed to hike eleven times in just over a year) have surged along with prices. 

Trying to keep pace, since September 2021, Americans have been drawing down savings at an average rate of about $70 billion a month — and that has accelerated to $85 billion since last fall.

Bad as Biden’s economy has been for Americans, if Harris gets into the White House and gets her way, hers will be even worse. It will be because Harris is even further to the left than Biden governed. Rather than being merely dependent on the left — though Harris assuredly would be — she is of the left already: drawn there not by necessity, but by ideology.

If Americans couldn’t afford Biden’s last four years, they really can’t afford four years of Kamala Harris on top of them.

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.