(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party, or candidate, on the part of Newsmax.)
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is pedaling furiously toward the center. Good for her!
Will she get there in time to win the election? Dubious.
She recently remarked, "Look: I am a capitalist." Hooray!
As I have written before, here and here, the Cold War is over. America, and capitalism, won.
Class warfare is over. Even the Democratic Party's hard-left wing is tolerating this heresy.
Perhaps the left hopes that it's a feint and, if elected, she will again tack left. They hope in vain; the political pendulum is swinging right.
I believe that Kamala Harris is simply a good politician. And she means it when portraying herself as, like me, a running dog, a phrase once popularized by Chairman Mao: "Just because we have won victory, we must never relax our vigilance against the frenzied plots for revenge by the imperialists and their running dogs."
I know, I know! Conjoining "good" with "politician" will strike most of my readers as an oxymoron.
Cynicism is understandable. But knock it off.
Good politicians have two really valuable skills.
First: Harry Truman in 1958 before the Reciprocity Club said: "I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government."
Second: the ability to "read the room," discerning what we-the-voters really want. Harris represented California, a left-leaning, lunatic-fringe state, adroitly.
Shrewdly, she then advocated for a lot of loony leftish propositions. She could do that with relative impunity as her advocacy was performative with little risk of enactment.
Harris is no ideologue. She's a smart politician.
Now she seeks to represent the center-right United States of America. A much bigger room.
She has read our national room adroitly and tacked to the center. She likely is sincere.
Yet she grew up, politically speaking, speaking only fluent progressive. She speaks capitalist haltingly.
Hypocritical? Nah, she just wants to be president.
Like all politicians from dogcatcher on up. A venial sin.
Becoming an avowed capitalist is a small price to pay for a shot at such a prize. However, there's no meat on the bones of her avowed capitalism.
Let's help her out.
According to The New York Times' Jim Tankersley, in her recent big economic policy speech Harris' heart (or at least rhetoric) is in the right place.
That said, when she came to the "where's the beef," she fumbled.
"Ms. Harris tried a version of it early in her campaign, blaming corporations for the elevated cost of groceries and proposing a federal ban on price gouging," Tankersley wrote.
"Other plans seemed chosen to support her case that the best way to help Americans get ahead in the economy is by government empowering private companies. She reiterated plans to incentivize contractors to build more housing units to bring down the cost of rent.
"She proposed an expansion of a tax deduction for start-up companies to encourage more business formation."
As President Joe Biden might say: Malarkey!
We working-class grocery shoppers find food prices onerous. But few buy the accusation that the grocers (operating on a profit margin of around 1.6%) or their wholesalers and suppliers are price gouging.
Come on, if grocers arbitrarily doubled their profit margin (which competition prohibits in the long run) it would up my $100 grocery bill to $101.60. Trivial.
"Incentivizing contractors to build more housing."
Big Government subsidizing Big Business? Trivial.
The real solution?
As Paul Krugman wrote: "Rents will probably come down over time in places where housing construction isn’t prevented by excessive regulation. (Sorry, this is one policy area where blue states generally get it wrong while many red states get it right.)"
A tax deduction to encourage more business formation? According to Pew, there were fewer than 1.8 million promising business applications in 2023, about one half percent of the US population. Trivial.
Same for her proposed $25,000 subsidy to first-time homebuyers. Trivial.
She's playing Little League economics in the World Series of politics. Not swinging for the fences to supercharge the economy to outrun the high cost of living.
Ms. Harris, I respect that you now are aspiring to represent the people of the United States, not merely Lala Land. As the co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and co-founder of The Capitalist League, I welcome you to the team.
Now, fire your legacy advisers and go big. Invite the rising-star supply-side progressives — like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith — to put together a robust, broad-based, equitable prosperity economic plan for you.
Then run on it while there's still time.
Run on a platform worthy of the original supply-sider, President John F. Kennedy, who promised "a rising tide lifts all the boats." Capitalism welcomes you, Kamala Harris.
Here's the beef.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.