Last week’s vice-presidential debate was chock-full of references to the middle class and plans to improve conditions for the middle class. That’s also a common refrain to the stump speech of presidential candidate Kamala Harris: She touts that she comes from the middle class, supports the middle class, and values the work ethic that defines the middle class. Her ties to the middle class are the reason, she suggests, that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” There’s just one problem. Key policies Harris supports are mostly about building up welfare, not the middle class.
When first unveiling her economic plans in August, Harris noted that she “grew up in a middle-class household” and promised to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class.” In September’s debate with Donald Trump, moderators asked Harris, “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” She issued a non sequitur of an answer that began with, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid.” Asked in an interview to describe “one or two specific things you have in mind” for “bringing down prices and making life more affordable,” she awkwardly began, “Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up in a middle-class family.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., parodied those answers at a recent rally in Michigan: “All you have to know is seven words, and you never have to admit to doing anything wrong again . . . I was born in the middle class.” The news-spoofing Babylon Bee similarly mocked Harris’s nonresponsive answers with the headline “‘I Was Born into a Middle-Class Family,’ Explains Wife When Husband Asks Why the Car Is on Fire.”
It all smacks of a career politician with significant income and assets trying desperately to appeal to middle-income voters. And it’s fair to ask exactly how middle-class Harris’s childhood was, given that her mother was a prominent biomedical scientist and her father was a tenured professor of economics at Stanford. Yet Harris’s emphasis on her supposedly humble roots reflects something more than standard political pandering. It’s also an effort to wrap middle-class respectability around proposals that are mostly welfare benefit expansions.
Take Harris’s plans for “restoring the expanded child tax credit” (CTC) — the first proposal in her recently released policy playbook, tellingly titled “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class.” It describes how the temporary 2021 CTC expansion “was one of the largest tax cuts ever passed for the middle-class” and “for millions of middle-class working families…helped them pay their mortgage or rent, buy food, and purchase basics for their kids, like books, diapers, clothes, and toys.” Her proposal would revive 2021’s “temporary middle-class tax relief” and permanently “provide a tax credit of up to $3,600 per child for the middle class and the most hard-pressed working families with children.”
Sounds like a winner, right? It might be, if that were an accurate reflection of the temporary 2021 policy Harris wants to revive. Take her claims of large tax cuts for working families. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the temporary 2021 CTC expansion provided around $20 billion in tax relief — just a fraction of the more than $80 billion in increased benefits it paid to parents who don’t work or earn enough to owe federal income taxes in the first place. The biggest individual winners? Parents who don’t work at all, who for the first time received full CTC checks, on top of tens of thousands of dollars in other welfare benefits they can already collect.
The changes resulted from temporarily suspending the CTC’s longstanding work requirement and work-incentive features, which effectively overturned bipartisan welfare reforms that Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress enacted a generation ago. Back then, liberals wrongly predicted disaster from expecting low-income parents to work. Leftists have tried to torpedo successful pro-work welfare reforms ever since. The pandemic created their opening, aptly summed up in a 2021 Washington Post headline: “Goodbye, Clinton welfare reform. Hello, child tax credit.” Under that temporary CTC policy — which Harris would not only revive, but make permanent — the IRS briefly became America’s biggest dispenser of welfare checks,
You won’t find reference to exploding welfare benefits anywhere in Harris’s policy playbook, which cloyingly appeals to the middle class more than 40 times. Just as critics have noted of her non-answers touting her middle-class upbringing, the misdirection is the point. But no amount of middle-class wrapping can conceal what Harris is really after: big new welfare checks for non-workers and inevitably higher taxes for everyone else who has to pick up the tab.
Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Reprinted with Permission from AEI.org – By Matt Weidinger
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
Harris’ rhetoric to identify with the “little people”is insulting. She may have been raised middle class, but she left that life decades ago.
From one of the author’s links to his 2021 article:
“That policy is in place for 2021, and in July monthly federal checks worth up to $300 per child started flowing to 39 million households, including many headed by nonworking adults never before eligible for such ‘child tax credits.'”
Then he wrote that a nonworking family could collect $20,000/year in food stamps and child tax credits, in addition to other “assistance” for utilities, education, etc.
I said a few times that harris growing up “middle class” was misinformation, since her mother was a microbiologist and her father (divorced, bud did provide) was a Stanford University professor. If that’s the kind of middle class she wishes for all Americans…she’s delusional.
Isn’t it amazing how generous we taxpayers are?! I wonder how long we can keep this up without bankrupting the entire American populace! The country that takes more than it makes is not going to last.
MAGA.
Kamala is an empty vessel, a houseplant with a (D) after her name. Her poll numbers may soon drop below what Biden’s were so don’t be surprised if she “voluntarily steps down” for the good of the country!
Just like student loan “forgiveness”, It’s just another veiled attempt at buying votes.
I’m going to put this right here.
“A democracy* cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
~ debatably attributed to Alexander Tytler
*The United States of America is a type of Democracy [not a pure direct democracy, as is the classical meaning of the term, but a mixed-Republic with a representative democracy and democratic spirit]. The United States is a Constitutional Federal Republic (a federation of states with a Representative Democracy). The description “democracy” is often used loosely of late.
Clearly she has no plan for anything. She does, however, have a word salad handy for any needed occasion.
Once upon a time government governed because people gave it the consent, now it lords over people making sure the basket of deplorables knows it’s place. King could only dream of such obedience and conformity. Press is subjugated as well and proud of it. We came full circle
Imrove the middle class-that’s a lie right there. A “New Way Forward” doesn’t mean a better way for me. I was raised middle class and pursued the “American Dream” the right way. I want to preserve the same opportunity for my son. She has in no way lived a middle class life.She was clearly raised upper class with highly educated parents that afforded the best schools, etc. Despite all the talk of racism from the left, DEI and EEOC offfered her many opportunities whether she admits it or not. Typical socialists want nothing better than dependence on the almighty government. She is what I would call a wanna be “Oligarch.”This is just one more of the socialist playbook ideas Kamala has for the “middle class”. First go after the children and brainwash them starting in government sanctioned daycare and liberal democrat controlled schools while trying to eliminate parental rights. Make sure Americans have access to abortion while overwhelming us with illegal migrants made “legal” by Harris and Biden. Next, attack religion and tear down the very fabric of our society to be re-built in socialist Oligarch’s image! Of course you need a financial crisis to further complete control and then you can justify the call call for redistribution of wealth and control “equity”. Betting most people on the low end of the middle class if asked “wouldn’t you like more money through “equity” would say yes in a heart beat. People that are bitter about their lot in life like these types of promises from the left. After all it sounds fair doesn’t it that we should take money from those that have it and redistribute to everyone even if not earned? Liberals fall for it every time. From one of the great female leaders of our time: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”― Margaret Thatcher
while i am sure her constituents would love that i wonder how she is going to pay for it that with so much of taxpayer dollars going to our enemies overseas? will you quit your job and go on welfare like so many of the young and stupid? why work if the government will carry you?
Kamala thinks she will be an Elite globalist. she’ll be pissed to be a slave (or dead)
like the rest of us serfs toiling as directed til dead by mistreatment.
Please Jesus help me and all of us find You and follow Your Teachings to better deserve Your Grace for all of us. (prayer
Sick, to make us all welfare and she controls or does the puppet master/s.
Where’s my comment, AMAC?
Important article, the matter of being truthful regarding the policies that will be sink or swim for many people is an issue that should be appreciated. I am a Reagan Conservative, have been one since 1981. The culture of this Constitutional Republic , has much influence on the idea of people wanting to and being able to contribute to a system that stands for honorable things. What AMAC. does ,I do believe helps to hold things together with an outlook that respects the principles of Faith, Family and Freedom. Music , films, literature, humor , can enhance good character, and civilization if done properly. The liberal anything goes attitude about music, films, literature,humor has done much to. tear down the idea of building a morally right society with a sense of National Character that can inspire honor, honesty, integrity,courage and loyalty. In the spirit of respect for truth and Liberty.
The Democrat’s ultimate objective is total control over everyone in the US and have everyone in the US dependent on the government. And they are demonstrating that they will do ANYTHING to achieve that goal, including shredding the constitution, attacking SCOTUS, political lawfare against their opposition, shutting down free speech, trafficking in illegals, and ignoring laws that, well, they just don’t like.
For decades, they have been locking the poor into the welfare state with more and more handouts, but zero hand-ups. They want to control our healthcare (Obamacare was the first stab at that). They want to control our speech, housing, food supplies, power supplies, education, and track everything we do thru a digital currency, controlled by guess who.
So is it any surprise that expanding welfare is one of Kamala’s objectives, or should I say, the people pulling her strings?
This is what the dishonest Harris meant when speaking of “building out the middle class”.
It boils down to communism. She’s using Chairman Mao’s very policy of “Joy,” and quoting daily Mao’s spell, “…unburdened by…” The motivation for welfare is simply to weaken the nation as a whole. I presume she’s in direct contact with the globalists who are working to usurp The American economy. The frightening thing is, she’s supported by millions!
Is this because of the inability of this administration to actually create jobs or is it because of their desire to have a fully dependent population (socialism – but who’s money are they spending?) or does it have something to do with the extra millions of individuals allowed in this country by the famous, or infamous, Czar of the Border, Kamala Harris, herself??? All of these minuscule amounts that Democrats throw out there as buying votes options aren’t helping anyone!!! In fact, it only serves to infuriate, insult and offend those who are receiving the handouts from the federal government who can’t do their job!!
Democrats have always cheated in the election by touting their willingness to buy votes by spending a ton of money on hand-outs to the “poor”. It is a big reason we are so deep in debt. They send tons of money to our enemies to try to pacify them and all that does is make them happy and let them build more weapons to us against us. If they get in again, our total economy will flop which is what they want.
All anyone needs to know right now is that Harris will say ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING to whatever group of people she is speaking to and also use whatever phony accent she feels that she needs in order to become president, Period! Believe her at your own peril!
I hope she loses the election, and I never hear about her nor see her ever again.
End goal is to end individual freedom and prosperity in USA.
Ask her where she is going to get the money when we are already TRILLIONS in DEBT ($38,Trillion and going) and the interest alone is in BILLIONS. No thanks to her & Joe’s policies, countries holding our Treasury Bonds are now unloading them and not buying US Bonds anymore. US Dollars is no longer the “Petro Dollar” reserve of the world. We owe China more than $3,TRILLION & the BILLIONS in interest alone is making them rich everyday, & if they decide to cash out, where is Kamala going to get the money? Remember, that Democrat politician’s promises are always broken. They just use it to garner votes and then they forget because they don’t have any plans how to implement it, so it becomes LES.I used to be a Democ until I studied their policies & voted them out of my support since JFK’s assassination. Wake up folks and save our country & world peace with brave Trump, the messenger of God.
Yawn, so what if Harris says she’s middle class. Why do you care? Her policy on this while having some good elements instead the best which is a reason why I vote for republicans.