Inflation and immigration remain the voters’ top concerns heading into the contest between President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris this November, and the policy platform put out by the Democratic National Convention this week would only make both problems much worse.
On inflation, Harris has embraced all of the huge spending that President Joe Biden couldn’t fit into his original inflation-causing $1.9 trillion spending plan. Remember all that free preschool, free paid leave, free child care, and free day care Biden had in his original Build Back Better plan? You know, all the stuff that centrist Democrats flinched at including in what they already knew was a bill with too much deficit spending? Well, Harris wants to spend all that money now.
Asked how she planned to pay for all this new spending before the convention, Harris rambled through a lengthy response in which she said “return on investment” four times and claimed all her new spending would “pay for itself.” This is, of course, completely untrue. While there are two decades-old studies that purportedly show that intensive investment in early childhood interventions does pay for itself, those studies were small and have never been replicated.
The largest, most recent studies, both of the federal government’s Head Start program and Tennessee’s pre-K program, both show no results or negative results for the children who participated in the programs. Far from helping children and showing a “return on investment,” in reality, the Democratic Party’s care economy only makes children and families worse off. And that is before considering that all of Harris’s new spending will only send inflation rising again.
Turning to immigration, the Democratic Party platform contains the largest amnesty program in the history of the United States, granting citizenship, welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to the 10 million illegal immigrants who were in the country before January 2021. According to the Congressional Budget Office, granting amnesty and full benefits to these illegal immigrants would add billions to the federal deficit on top of the financial burden they are already causing state and local governments.
Then there is the question of what to do about the 3.8 million illegal immigrants who have been caught and released into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration. While they have not endorsed a date change, every Democratic Party amnesty in the past sets the date of amnesty eligibility at the date the amnesty is written. So there is every reason to think that when Harris writes her actual amnesty bill, it will include every illegal immigrant Biden let into the country, raising the total number of illegal immigrants given citizenship under the Harris regime to 13.8 million.
Worse, Harris has endorsed the Lankford-Mayorkas bill, which would codify Biden’s catch-and-release border policies. Under the Lankford-Mayorkas bill, all migrants caught illegally crossing the border could be entered into Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “alternative to detention program.” Migrants would then be free to cut off their ankle bracelets, ignore ICE, travel wherever they wanted, and wait until the Democratic Party’s next amnesty, safely knowing no effort would be made to track them down and deport them.
Aside from making inflation and immigration worse, the Democratic Party platform also raises taxes on oil and gas companies, making energy prices and everything you buy at the store more expensive. The document also calls for “environmental justice” reviews, which will make it even more expensive to build everything from highways to high-speed rail to clean energy projects.
And then there are the tax hikes, including a rise in the corporate tax rate, which every economist will tell you leads to lower worker pay, and a new tax on unrealized capital gains, which would be destined for reversal by the Supreme Court.
Harris has made every effort to moderate her positions on immigration and government spending since she helped push Biden out of the race. The Democratic Party platform goes in the exact opposite direction, adopting far-left positions on every hot-button issue voters care about. Republicans should make every effort to tie Harris to this radical document.
In accepting the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, Walz tried to present himself as a sort of Mister Rogers type whom everybody should want as their neighbor. But in the weeks ahead, that image will have to contend against a record that includes a history of fabrication and radicalism.
In his speech, Walz tried to portray Democrats as a laissez-faire party. He claimed that in Minnesota, “We respect our neighbors, and the personal choices they make, and even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: ‘Mind your own damn business!’”
But as governor, he imposed among the most draconian Covid restrictions in the nation and even set up a hotline for residents to rat out neighbors who weren’t following his social-distancing rules.
In Walz’s twisted moral universe, “Mind your own damn business!” isn’t actually about letting neighbors make their own choices, it is a justification for the unfettered ability to kill unborn babies.
In another reframing of freedom, Walz said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.”
It is a universal truth that whenever a politician says he believes in the Second Amendment and then adds a “but,” he doesn’t actually believe in the Second Amendment.
During her first run for president, Kamala Harris called for the confiscation of AR-15-style guns, a position that she has yet to publicly disavow (despite what campaign officials tell reporters). At a minimum, Harris and Walz have both called for banning them.
Walz also claimed that Democrats support Americans’ ability to make their own health-care decisions. Meanwhile, he and Harris both support expanding Obamacare, which mandated that every American had to purchase government-designed health-insurance policies and outlawed policies that millions had used. In her first campaign, Harris proposed kicking 180 million people off of their private insurance.
Meanwhile, Walz lied about the positions of his opponents. He falsely claimed that there was a Project 2025 plan to “gut” Social Security and Medicare and ban abortion nationwide “with or without Congress” and that Donald Trump supported it — and implied that Trump and J. D. Vance were a threat to IVF. Though I wish Trump were actually serious about reining in entitlement programs, in reality Trump has disavowed Project 2025 (which, again, doesn’t call for Social Security cuts anyway), and the Republican platform that he had direct control over explicitly says that abortion should be left to the states, that IVF access should be supported, and that Medicare and Social Security shouldn’t be cut.
These distortions shouldn’t be a surprise. Over the course of decades, Walz has played fast and loose with the facts for his political benefit. He has enabled misrepresentations of his career in the Minnesota National Guard to flourish. In the run-up to the convention, in attacking Vance with the false claim that he wanted to ban IVF, Walz advanced another lie — that his own children were conceived through the procedure. In reality, his wife used another fertility treatment that does not involve the creation or destruction of embryos outside of the womb. (He was more careful in his phrasing during his convention speech.) These lies are on top of a history of untruthful statements during his career, including his preposterous claims that 80 percent of rioters after the George Floyd killing came from out of state and that, despite protracted school closures during Covid, “over 80 percent of our students missed less than ten days of in-class learning.”
Though Walz tried to tout tax cuts in his convention speech, he has been a fiscally reckless governor, squandering surpluses on liberal wish-list items and proposing tax increases on individuals, businesses, capital gains, dividends, and gas, as well as various fees.
