by Larry Sand
The putative Democratic candidate for POTUS will be disastrous if elected.
Barring a possible but unlikely “October surprise,” Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president. When Democratic string pullers decided that Joe Biden was unfit to run again, Harris became the obvious—if not best—choice.
Her disapproval ratings are telling. While 38% approve of Harris, 52% disapprove, and a detailed report by the David Horowitz Freedom Center spells out a legacy that would make the late Joe Stalin proud. Just a few of the taxpayer disasters that Harris has in mind are that health care is a fundamental right and “Medicare for All” should be the policy. She also believes in economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work. She favors family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security for all workers, as well as “high-quality health care” administered by the federal government.
Harris also adheres to all the au-courant left-wing fashions. As the Black Lives Matter riots were spreading like wildfire, she tried to set up a bail fund for those who were arrested. She wants to ban right-to-work laws, which allow private industry workers not to be forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment.
Harris fought for the passage of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan”—virtually all of which was financed by borrowed money and which even liberal finance experts warned would be inflationary—and she cast the deciding vote for the laughably named “Inflation Reduction Act,” the projected costs of which have risen to more than $1 trillion, leading to out-of-control inflation.
She is a nightmare on taxes. As if we are all not forking over enough money already, Harris has pushed to raise the corporate income tax, expand the estate tax, impose a financial transaction tax on stock trades, raise the top marginal income tax rate on the top 1% to 39.6%, and implement a 4% “income-based premium” on households making more than $100,000 annually to pay for her “Medicare for All” gambit.
Harris, as the so-called border czar, has failed miserably. In fact, “border-free czar” would be much more accurate. Under her watch, illegal immigration has exploded. As of January 2024, more than 7.2 million migrants had illegally crossed into the U.S. over the southern border during the Biden administration—a number higher than the individual populations of 36 states. Even left-wing fact-checker Snopes rates this number as accurate.
Harris is notorious for rambling, often incoherently, when speaking. Cal Thomas offers a typical example of her word salads: “Culture is (pause) It is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And, and present culture is the way we express our feeling about the moment. And, and we should always find time to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy ’cause, eeeh, you know, it comes in the morning (cackles). We also have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and, and and, a connection to how people are experiencing life and I think about it in that way, too.”
And then there is education. Harris asserted in 2019, “I am running to declare education is a fundamental right, and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-k and debt-free college!”
That same year, as a senator, she tried and failed to enshrine the 21st Century STEM for Girls and Underrepresented Minorities Act, which would have directed the Education Department to provide funding for school districts to cover the costs of STEM education activities for girls and children from racial minorities. Harris supports increasing Title I funding, changing the Title I formula to be “more equitable,” and incentivizing states to increase spending on schools. The current national outlay of $927 billion on government schools will easily top $1 trillion if Harris gets her way.
In November 2019, Harris proposed offering federal funds to encourage schools to add after-school programming to accommodate working families’ schedules.
When running for president in 2020, Harris said she would work to cut child poverty by 50% in her first term. Her proposed strategies included expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit and boosting food stamp benefits for children.
Most recently, Harris inanely proclaimed, “And yet, today, extremists pass book bans—book bans, in this year of our Lord 2024—while they also try to erase, overlook, and rewrite the ugly parts of our past.”
It’s no surprise that she is the darling of the teachers’ unions. She maintains that public school teachers earn 11% less than professionals with similar educations.” To address the situation, which Harris claimed in 2019 is “creating disastrous consequences,” proposed providing the “average teacher” with a $13,500 raise, with states being forced to add $1 to the pot for every $3 the feds throw in.
The cost of Harris’ teacher pay plan would be prohibitive. As Mike Antonucci explains, the raise would cost taxpayers about $42 billion a year. Not only that, but teacher pensions are typically based on average salary over a period of time, and Harris’ scheme would greatly stress already underfunded state pension systems.
It’s worth noting that the above assertions are erroneous when looking at what teachers really make. As Just Facts notes, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. made $66,397 in salary but received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions) for a total compensation of $100,487.
Additionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, including time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.
Overall, with various perks included, a teacher makes an average of $68.85 per hour, whereas a private sector worker makes about $40 per hour.
The National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, announced its endorsement of Harris on July 24. The following day, Harris gave a rip-roaring speech at the American Federation of Teachers convention, in which she trotted out a bevy of bromides that warmed the cockles of the unionistas’ hearts.
“While you (the teachers) teach about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn, and to acknowledge our nation’s full history, including book bans,” she declared. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”
Harris doubled down on the Biden administration’s ambitious efforts to ease the burden of student loan debt by describing a teacher in Philadelphia she met recently who had been paying off her student loan for 20 years but still had $40,000 to pay off, despite being part of the public service loan program that has been in place for years.
“We forgave it all,” she said.
However, as the New York Times reports, Ms. Harris’s speech to the AFT ignored several crucial education issues that could put her on shaky political ground, and that Republicans are ready to pounce on them.
She avoided discussing the horrific damage caused by the pandemic-era school closures, which were dictated by the teachers’ unions. She did not address whether families should have greater access to charter schools, private school choice, or public funds for homeschooling—all popular options that the unions falsely claim reduce funding for traditional public schools. Harris also never alluded to the rampant antisemitism and stifling of free speech on college campuses that the teachers’ unions haven’t addressed.
A vote for Harris will accelerate America’s descent into an authoritarian, woke, and socialist hellhole. While Trump is far from perfect, he is a much better choice to lead the country.
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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/02/the-looming-kamala-calamity/
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