(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party, or candidate, on the part of Newsmax.)
In case you're wondering what Kamala Harris means in referring to her "Opportunity Economy" plan and whether or how the 82-page "New Way Forward" policies her campaign released last Wednesday differ from "Bidenomics," which she lavishly praised as "working" a year ago, don't set your hopes too high.
As another heads-up, reinvented presidential candidate Harris also declared last week that she's now a capitalist. However, based upon that document, don't get too excited about that miraculous ideological transformation either.
Same Big Tax and Spend Uber-Liberal
As noted by Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Harris campaign emphasizes that "corporations and the wealthiest Americans should pay their fair share" without defining what is "fair" and for whom.
Whereas her so-called new plan proposes a whopping $5 trillion in tax hikes, including a 25% tax on the unrealized capital gains on top earners, this "commonsense reform" differs only in calling for a 33% top capital gains rate instead of 44.6%, representing the biggest U.S. tax hike in history.
Among her easiest tax target villains, a President Harris would push to raise the corporate rate from 21% to 28% and to allow the 199A deduction, which grants pass-through entities the right to exclude 20% of their income from taxation, to expire for C corporations.
Together, this corporate-rate hike would be the largest increase enacted for any major advanced economy in at least 45 years, with a large share of the burden falling directly on workers and consumers through lost jobs and inflationary retail prices.
Harris also proposes to add to corporate carnage by letting the 199A tax break deduction for many millions of existing small struggling businesses expire in 2025, while offering $50,000 deduction benefits to new startups, often with little or no comparable "skin in the game."
More Subsidies for Government-Knows-Best Industries
If you want to expand federal government control of the U.S. economy (already at 24% of gross domestic product, a Harris-Walz White House is just the ticket to pick.
Although she now disavows her 2019 campaign pledge to end fracking and claims in a latest flip-flop that she no longer supports electric vehicle mandates, as recently as last March the Harris-Biden administration finalized a crackdown on gas cars, pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to enact regulations that are expected to result in more than two-thirds of passenger cars and light trucks sold by 2032 to be electric or hybrid vehicles.
This is occurring at a time when manufacturers are losing money on each EV produced.
Claiming she wants to "build on efforts" in the ridiculously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to "lower energy costs" and ensure "that we never again have to rely on foreign oil," count on this meaning more subsidies for solar panels and EVs on top of the $1.2 trillion already in the IRA pipeline.
According to estimates assembled by Americans for Tax Reform, since Harris cast the tie-breaking August 2022 vote to pass the $739 billion IRA, the cost of new mortgages has climbed 36% in those two years; the cost of baby food has shot up by 13%; frozen vegetables have increased by 14%; and there have been major increases in the cost of butter, bread, flour, breakfast cereal, and transportation.
Add to this, Harris' tie-breaking vote on the Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act budget boondoggle that included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public EV charging stations across the U.S. — as of April, only eight had been built.
Wall Street Journal editorial board predicts that a Harris-Walz administration will also exert more government control over healthcare, including expanding and making permanent IRA Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire in 2025.
Millions enrolled in Obamacare plans pay no premiums, owing to the subsidies, which average about $6,000.
And while Harris has previously expressed support for Medicare For All, a financial-transactions tax and a new form of wealth tax, she has also reversed course on these and other progressive proposals just ahead of the November elections.
Candidate Harris' new subsidies would include a $25,000 grant for first-time homebuyers which would fuel increased demand while raising prices.
It will also provide a $40 billion "local innovation fund for housing expansion" conditioned on rules that require localities to "cut red tape" and developers to employ "innovative building and construction techniques."
Beware that such euphemisms really mean putting the Feds in control of local zoning and building codes.
Kamala Harris' vapid campaign slogans to "turn the page" and embrace her undefined "opportunity economy" plan attempt to divert attention away from recent memories of a vibrant Trump presidency before the Bidenomics she championed sunk household and business budgets in wave of inflation while drowning future generations in hopeless debt.
Throughout her political career she has turned away from the greatest economic opportunity strategy of all.
It's called free market capitalism.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.