POLIBIZ – In her interview on a “60 Minutes" election special of CBS, when host Bill Whitaker asked Vice President Kamala Harris how she would fund her economic plan and how she'd get it through Congress, she seemed to provide an answer not coming from a real world.
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Harris’ economic plan on investing in small businesses, in the middle class by a mass handouts and tax-cut is something appealing, humanitarian and not bad at all. However, it’s actually just a small segment of an overall economy (not to mention a bigger world economy landscape), and can’t be seen as a strategy or a master plan for a national economy. Thus, she had to (and will, if elected) face the question of how to fund all the handouts as her plan.
Bill Whitaker : “The question was how are you going to pay for it?”
Kamala Harris: “Well one of the things is I'm going to make sure that the richest among Us who can afford it pay their fair share in taxes. It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires. and the biggest corporations and I plan on making that fair."
Bill Whitaker: “But we're dealing with the real world here but the real world includes how are you going to get this through Congress?”
Kamala Harris: “You know when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I'm talking about because their constituents know exactly what I'm talking about. Their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses ...”
Back to the bone, her actual answers just meant that every all related individuals and entities already agreed to her plan: billionaires and big corporations all accepted higher taxes on their incomes as a fair share; Republicans and Democrats all agreed to raise the corporate and income taxes because of a matter of constituents ...
As a matter of fact-check, there hasn’t been a single clue that any of the top billionaires like Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Larry Page (Google) ... ever agreed to her to “pay the fair share”. Actually, many of them even never met her before.
In addition, the US House of Representatives is currently led by Republicans, and Donald Trump's economic policy is to further cut corporate taxes to encourage expansion of production domestically - something that is contrary to Harris's policy. Therefore, if elected, Harris's tax increase bill would certainly face opposition from the House.
There was no improvement in Harris's answer compared to her answers in previous interviews. Harris's campaign seems to lack a competent economic advisor with a basic knowledge of macroeconomics to help her prepare an answer in the usual way and of common sense. Bill Whitaker seemed a bit nervous and had to repeat his question because it was clear that his interviewer had not understood the core of the question.
It is also possible that Harris is actually very smart and tricky. She just needs to present a policy that sounds attractive and populist to a large number of voters to ensure her victory; while she herself already knows that the policy is completely feasible to implement in practice, since no fund no handouts. And later, if she wins the election, when people question why she did not implement her promised policies, she will simply answer that it was because the Congress refused to pass her bill, and the fault will lie with her opponents, not herself.
Tonight, on a 60 Minutes election special, Vice President Kamala Harris shares her plan to strengthen the economy by investing in small businesses and the middle class. Bill Whitaker asks how she’ll fund it and get it through Congress. https://t.co/3Kyw3hgBzr pic.twitter.com/HdAmz0Zpxa
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 7, 2024
