Kamala Harris clearly thinks she’s got some momentum. She’s been busy fundraising, getting massaged by Oprah, and she is currently trying to get another debate.

Although I’m not quite sure who she thinks she’s debating.

Kamala says she'd "like another debate" with the "former vice president."

Does she think she's running against Mike Pence? Dick Cheney? Dan Quayle? Has she covered up Biden's cognitive decline for so long that it has now rubbed off on her? pic.twitter.com/ZfO2vujDZT

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 22, 2024

Team Kamala is definitely feeling the wind at their backs – though they may not have realized that it’s the media’s overwhelming flatulence on her behalf. She just got a ton of money from the deep pockets in New York, taking in a cool $27 million on Sunday. And now she is apparently planning a speech on her economic policies this coming Wednesday.

Harris also said she would deliver a speech Wednesday outlining her economic vision, saying there is “more we can do to invest in the aspirations and ambitions of the American people while addressing the challenges they face.”

She cited the high cost of home ownership and stubbornly high grocery bills as examples.

“I grew up a middle-class kid and I will never forget where I came from,” she said.

By fleshing out her economic agenda in more detail, Harris can address an issue that’s front of mind for voters after prices soared during Biden’s presidency and distance herself from the president’s economic track record. Trump has criticized her for being slow to release detailed policy proposals of her own since she rose to the top of the ticket.

Every single time Kamala has been asked a question about the economy, we always hear about her “middle class” upbringing.

My favorite thing about Kamala Harris's rehearsed "I grew up a middle class kid" script is she uses it when she's asked how she's going to lower costs

And her actual answer she's word-salading towards is "I'm going to spend more money." pic.twitter.com/6W88hQpgYh

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) September 17, 2024

It would not be surprising at all if her speech on her economic policies started like this:

Jokes aside, what WILL Kamala Harris actually put forward in an economic policy speech?

None of the sources would provide specific details on the expected new policies, and the Harris campaign would not comment on any new proposals. However, Harris’ 2020 presidential run and President Joe Biden’s administration included plans with similar goals.

In her 2020 campaign, Harris proposed significant pay hikes for the millions of public school teachers, forcing companies to disclose their pay gap between men and women and penalizing those who are not narrowing it. The Biden and Harris administration have pushed to eliminate bias in home appraisals and use the over $700 billion federal contracting budget to buoy minority businesses.

Harris has released a basket of economic policies focused on the high cost of housing, taxes, small business expenses, childcare and goods. Her plans often build on Biden’s policies, like increasing the child tax credit and lifting the corporate tax rate to 28%.

Campaign spokesman James Singer told Reuters that Harris “will continue to present her opportunity economy agenda to lower costs, make housing more affordable, and spur economic growth across America.”

We’ve already heard about Kamala’s plan to give first time homeowners “downpayment assistance,” we’ve heard how she lifted the entire “no tax on tips” idea and an increase in the child tax credit from Donald Trump, and now we’re beginning to hear how she wants to “cap” child care costs at 7% of a family’s income. But she’s never explained HOW she would implement such a radical price control on child care, or how you could even begin to pay for that without getting government even deeper into the babysitting business.

Along with housing prices, child-care costs are among the last remnants of inflation haunting Americans — a point that Biden administration economists have conceded. Although gas, cars and groceries, including bread, bacon and vegetables, have all become cheaper in the past year, day-care costs have risen 6.2 percent — more than double the rate of overall inflation.

Well, yeah – you have to PAY the people who watch the children, and the price of EVERYTHING ELSE has gone up. So of course the cost of child care has gone up!

Those high costs are increasingly factoring into how people plan to vote in the presidential election, just over six weeks away. More than one-third of mothers who are registered to vote said they worry “a lot” about affording child care, according to a recent KFF poll.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made the “care economy” a cornerstone of her platform, vowing to permanently increase the child tax credit, add a one-time $6,000 credit for newborns and cap child-care costs at 7 percent of a working family’s income. Former president Donald Trump has also said he would consider expanding the child tax credit, though he has not offered further details. Meanwhile, his running mate, JD Vance, has argued that children would benefit from a stay-at-home parent, suggesting families should rely more on “grandma and grandpa” to save on child care.

J.D. Vance actually put together a pretty spectacular response about childcare on Twitter/X as a reply – and you know he wrote this himself.

Hi Hannah, I hope you've been doing well. A few thoughts here.

1) Many don't fully appreciate how federal (and state) policy penalizes particular family models–particularly in-home care and kinship care–over others. That's true of the Child Care Development Block Grant and the…

— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 5, 2024

The entire post reads, after his greeting:

1) Many don’t fully appreciate how federal (and state) policy penalizes particular family models–particularly in-home care and kinship care–over others. That’s true of the Child Care Development Block Grant and the Dependent Care Tax Credit, though in different ways for each. So yes, parents or grandparents might not be able to help, but they might *want* to, and for those families federal policy should not be forcing one particular family model. We should try to encourage whatever is best for each individual family. Right now we don’t: we try to force or at least subsidize one model on every family in this country. And if you open up kinship and other options for families, you will relieve some pressure on the daycare system in this country.

2) If you subsidize something but don’t increase the supply of it, you’re going to raise prices without getting an increase in quality. This is what’s so broken about Kamala Harris’s approach to child care. You can’t just write a check if there aren’t additional providers. So while I obviously support health and safety regulations, there are some absurd regulations out there that restrict the supply of child care providers–from kinship providers to local churches. Just because the interests of the market are not always aligned with families–I agree and have said so myself!–doesn’t mean that all government regulations make sense.

3) Finally, we have to consider the broken educational pathways that exist for a whole host of professions. A consistent thing I’ve heard is that there is great demand for a lot of jobs, but a totally broken pathway for young people to get into those jobs. It’s true of plumbers and advanced manufacturing, but it’s also true of child care providers.

4) I’m sorry if you think I believe children are a means to an end. I can assure you I don’t, though I do believe that children are not just incredible little creatures in their own right: they are also transformative for the people who care for them.

As we all know, J.D. Vance has a personal connection to grandparents being involved in the raising of their grandchildren, so it makes sense that he would advocate for that when it is possible. And he is completely correct about the laws of supply and demand when it comes to child care – right now, the demand has outrun the supply, so the prices have gone up. (And that’s not even mentioning the wild swings in quality between providers.) Unless you can incentivize people to go into the child care business, then the problem is never going to be solved. And are those people going to work for minimum wage? Kamala Harris always has the same solution – make government pay for it. Can you imagine the tax paperwork that would be involved in calculating how much 7% would be for each individual family who is looking for subsidized child care – and the fun the IRS will have with that? Not to mention the wait lists, and the fact that daycare businesses are not open 24 hours a day, seven days a week – so you are out of luck if you have to work weekends. Big daddy government cannot handle it all, or pay for it all. Not without introducing price controls, government-run daycare facilities on a large scale, and racking up massive debt.

We’ve already been through “Bidenomics” and the demand of “making the rich pay their fair share.” (Hunter Biden was unavailable for comment.) This upcoming speech by Kamala Harris is likely to be light on specifics (as always) and will just repeat what she has already said, while mentioning “opportunity economy” a half dozen times. And the media will happily swallow the crap sandwich seasoned with “JOY!” because it’s all that she’s going to give them, and they expect the rest of us to eat it, too.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click