Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him. That means that America may soon have its most left-wing president ever. Harris wants to increase government spending even faster than Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, Harris supports the Green New Deal, which could cost $90 trillion — more than three times the size of our economy. Harris supports spending trillions of dollars on race-based reparations, which Biden hedged on. That would be bad for the economy — foreign countries that adopted race-based reparations and race-based redistribution of wealth seriously damaged their economies by doing so, without eliminating racial gaps. Harris is a more enthusiastic supporter of student loan bailouts than Joe Biden. Biden initially doubted his power to forgive student loans, and only embarked on mass student loan forgiveness at the urging of left-wingers like Kamala Harris, over the objections of more sensible people in his administration. Business Insider notes that Treasury Secretary Janet “Yellen was skeptical of a student-loan forgiveness plan as Biden made up his mind,” according to the New York Times, while “Kamala Harris was one of the administration’s most forceful advocates of loan relief.”
Student loan bailouts are a bad idea, because they encourage colleges to raise tuition, enabling the expansion of administrative bloat. Student loan bailouts also prop up low-quality colleges and law schools, and predatory graduate-school programs, that fewer people would attend if they didn’t think they could attend them on student loans that might later be written off at taxpayer expense.
Harris is more likely to win the general election than Biden, because Biden is a relatively unpopular Democrat — as is illustrated by the fact that Democrats perform better on the generic Congressional ballot than Biden does. Harris is also younger than Donald Trump, and some voters care about the president’s age. While Trump had a slight lead over Biden in the polls, the Democrats retained a big financial and organizational edge, leading a major political polling & prediction website to declare the election a dead heat, with a 51% chance that Trump would win, and a 49% chance that Biden would win. Harris replacing Biden means that the Democrats might achieve a trifecta in 2024 — winning not just the Presidential election, but also control of both houses of Congress. Democrats are already better positioned to win control of the House of Representatives than they were in 2022, when Republicans performed better on the generic Congressional ballot than they do now.
The National Review’s Dan McLaughlin — who intends to vote Republican for down-ballot races, but won’t vote for either Trump or the Democrat in the presidential race — notes that Trump is fairly unpopular: “even with everything possible going Donald Trump’s way, his favorability with the voting public is double digits underwater & has been continuously for over two years. He has never once been more popular than unpopular in 8 years.”
Harris has supported using tax dollars to pay reparations to blacks, since at least 2019, when the New York Times reported on her support for reparations, which it described as a “policy that experts say could cost several trillion dollars.” Reparations could cost far more than that. Black law professors and critical race theorists have called for paying millions of dollars to each Black resident, which could cost $200 trillion. A Stanford panel called for spending $10 trillion to $12 trillion on reparations.
If reparations are awarded to black people, other groups will line up to demand reparations, too, such as Native Americans, potentially ballooning their cost. Joe Biden said he was open to the possibility of reparations payments to both Blacks and Native Americans, although he avoided definitively endorsing reparations.
Similarly, reparations may end up being paid to sexual minorities, as left-leaning governments have already done in foreign countries. In 2019, Argentina’s Neuquén province provided pensions to transgender individuals over 40 as a form of reparations. Left-leaning governments in Uruguay and Argentina reserved some government jobs for transgender people as a form of reparations.
Reparations tend to harm a country’s economy, without permanently eliminating its wealth gaps. Zimbabwe’s policy of redistributing wealth from whites to blacks ruined its economy and left even blacks worse off. Many people just spend windfalls they receive from the government, rather than saving or investing the money.
When Uganda seized the businesses of its Indian people without compensation and gave them to black people as reparations for colonialism, the businesses did not last for long afterwards, and Uganda’s economy collapsed. When Uganda let Indians come back to Uganda and set up businesses again 14 years later, Indians once again ended up dominating Uganda’s commercial sector, even though they had to start from scratch.
For more than 50 years, Malaysia has systematically discriminated against its large ethnic Chinese minority, and in favor of its Malay ethnic majority, giving Malays affirmative-action preferences in jobs, education, and government contracts. Yet, Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese continue to out-earn its ethnic Malays, and continue to have more wealth per capita. Why should Malays work and study as hard as the Chinese when affirmative action lets them coast?
Reparations are not justified by its supporters’ desire to eliminate racial wealth gaps. White people’s wealth today is not based on slavery or redlining (nor is America’s wealth based on slavery), so reparations can’t be justified on that basis. Most wealth isn’t inherited. And “most of the wealth gap between blacks and whites is not due to inheritance” — indeed, the black-white wealth gap among people who had no inheritance is about three-quarters as big as it is among people who did have an inheritance. (See Thompson & Suarez, Exploring the Racial Wealth Gap Using the Survey of Consumer Finances (2015)).
Racism is not the reason why blacks make less money than whites. Non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia commonly earn more than whites do, showing that racism is not a barrier to success. Asian Americans have the highest average net worth and highest average income, despite harsh discrimination against Chinese and Japanese Americans in the past. There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for poor Americans of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.
The racial wealth gap is not due to wealth inherited from whites enriched by racism. Little wealth is inherited from three generations or more earlier, because people who inherit wealth tend to spend it or lose it. “According to Time Magazine, 90 percent of all rich families, from the Astors to the Ziffs, lose their fortune by the third generation,” noted Ester Bloom in The Atlantic. So white people’s wealth does not originate in slavery or the Jim Crow era.
Past discrimination did not cause present-day racial disparities in wealth or income. Asians once were subjected to massive discrimination, yet today, they have higher incomes than whites. As the New York Post notes, “several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states [including California]. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II,” which forced many interned Japanese people to sell their businesses at fire-sale prices, ruining them. “But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.”
Conversely, minorities targeted by racist attacks often rebuild their wealth by tightening their belts and reducing consumption to bring their wealth back up to past levels. So racism doesn’t necessarily reduce the wealth of their descendants. For example, blacks rebuilt Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” after a white mob burned it down. And medieval and north African Jews often rebuilt European ghettos that were destroyed by antisemitic mobs. As a web site notes,
Thanks to recent scholarship and pop culture depictions of the massacre in Greenwood, more and more Americans are coming to know the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed Black Wall Street. But the common narrative — that the massacre destroyed the neighborhood and it never recovered — is incorrect. In fact, Greenwood’s resilient residents rebuilt their community almost immediately after the massacre — in defiance of hastily-enacted racist zoning codes — giving rise to the popular use of the neighborhood’s moniker of Black Wall Street after, not before, the massacre.
The student loan forgiveness urged by Kamala Harris was not only a bad idea, it was also done in an illegal way. As Politico reported, “Harris was an early voice inside the administration advocating for forgiving student debt — a major item on progressives’ wish lists — even as the White House engaged in a protracted debate over how to approach the issue during 2021 and much of 2022.”
But legal obstacles didn’t stop the Biden administration from doing it. After the Supreme Court ruled last year that Biden’s attempt to cancel $500 billion in student loan debt was illegal, Biden canceled some of the same debt using new excuses, writing off billions more in student loans. In April, 17 states sued the Biden administration over its new plans to cancel student loans, arguing that Biden’s new plan was illegal, too. Recently, a federal appeals court ruled against much of Biden’s new student-loan forgiveness scheme, finding it to be illegal.
Canceling student loans is a bad idea. It encourages colleges to jack up tuition, by making it more attractive to take out big loans to cover college tuition. When students are willing to borrow more to go to college, colleges respond by raising tuition. The Daily Caller notes that “each additional dollar in government financial aid translated to a tuition hike of about 65 cents,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Canceling student loan debt is “regressive and unfair,” says Katherine Abraham, a former adviser to Obama who served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Clinton administration. As Greg Price points out, “Only 37% of Americans have a 4-yr college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees, and a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school. Biden’s plan to cancel it would be like taking money from a plumber to pay the debt of a lawyer.” Even the liberal Washington Post called Biden’s student-loan bailout “a regressive, expensive mistake.”
Student loan forgiveness also is inflationary. Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Biden’s plan to cancel student loans “reckless.” Furman said, “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.” Biden’s student loan forgiveness will increase inflation, inequality, tuition, and the national debt.
Harris backs harmful left-wing regulatory policies as well. For example, Harris has called for a ban on fracking, which caused the revival of America’s energy sector. A ban on fracking would wipe out countless jobs: Fracking will add 7.7 million jobs and $1.1 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2025, according to an Energy Department report.
