(DCNF)—Vice President Kamala Harris released an 82-page document explaining her vision for the economy on Wednesday, but the plan shares much in common with President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.
The plan, titled “A New Way Forward For The Middle Class,” proposes to build upon Biden initiatives like student loan debt cancellation, industrial policy, huge subsidies for green energy and going after corporations for alleged price gouging. Prior to quitting the presidential race under immense political pressure, voters were largely dissatisfied with Biden’s economy, which had come to be defined by 40-year high inflation.
“Harris isn’t going to stray very far from current Biden policies,” Ryan Young, a senior economist for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “She is trying to steer a middle course between carving out her own identity, but without implying that Biden has pushed bad policies, which she has been promoting for the last four years.”
Kamala Harris Economic Plan by Nick Pope on Scribd
Harris aims to “[make] corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share in taxes,” something she plans to do by essentially replicating the $5 trillion tax hike that Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request called for. Some of Harris’ “common sense” reforms that would fuel this tax hike include a 25% unrealized capital gains tax for high-earning Americans and a top capital gains tax rate of 33%, an aggressive-but-less-ambitious alternative to the 44.6% rate that Biden has proposed.
“Americans should be deeply concerned about any political program attempting to brand a massive increase in taxes – in this case, including a tax on unrealized capital gains – as ‘new,’” Peter Earle, a senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Increasing the reach of the confiscatory claws of the government while simultaneously amping up spending is how the US has accumulated $35 trillion in debt, over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and debased the dollar by 90 or more percent in fifty years … And to the extent that few specifics are given, there’s no reason not to assume that Harris’ policy goals are not simply a continuation of Bidenomics.”
Those tax increases may be necessary to pay for the litany of entitlements Harris is proposing.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a future with affordable, high-quality child care and pre-K, long-term care, and paid leave, while supporting care workers and family caregivers,” the economic plan reads, without attaching any price tag to the proposals. Biden either endorsed or pursued each of these policies during his term as president.
Harris’ plan also calls for a $25,000 subsidy for qualifying first-time homebuyers. This would actually end up raising home prices, in large part because “the best way to reduce housing prices is to build more housing, not to subsidize existing housing,” according to Young.
Biden has previously proposed a similar $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and those selling their first homes.
A Harris-Walz administration “will invest in building the energy industries of the future here in the United States, keeping the well-paid union jobs of the future here at home” while building on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s massive climate law. Beyond hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the green energy industry, the IRA also features tax credits that Americans can claim to install things like heat pumps and rooftop solar in their homes.
Undecided voter in Georgia: “If you look at the statistics now, we’re far worse now than we were before. Everything is worse now with Biden and Harris.”pic.twitter.com/poBh0V6lN0
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 20, 2024
Harris touts these credits in her new plan, stating that they allowed “more than 3.4 million American families [to save] $8.4 billion in 2023.” Missing from the economic plan is the fact that more than half of those savings were claimed by people making more than $100,000, and that six-figure-plus earners were over three times more likely to claim the credits, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
Like Biden, Harris is also promising to be a strong ally of organized labor if elected.
“She will also prevent misclassification of employees, and override so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws that prevent workers from freely organizing,” Harris’ economic plan states. “She will also continue to fight for manufacturing and infrastructure projects that benefit from significant public support to be subject to strong prevailing wage requirements, as well as Project Labor Agreements for construction projects above appropriate minimal thresholds.”
Notably, “right-to-work” laws do not prevent workers from organizing; such laws simply give workers the choice as to whether or not they would like to join a union or pay union dues, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the subsidies Biden unleashed on the American economy include labor requirements that advantage labor unions.
Throughout his first term, Biden repeatedly alleged that corporate greed and price gouging has led to price spikes for goods like gasoline and groceries, for example, while many economists and observers have actually blamed his tax-and-spend agenda for driving inflation. Nevertheless, Harris seems keen to continue blaming companies for higher prices, at least rhetorically.
A prospective Harris-Walz administration “will go after nefarious price gouging on essential goods during emergencies or times of crisis,” the plan states. Harris had previously trotted out a broader version of this policy in August, but she and her team subsequently specified that de facto price controls would only take effect in the wake of emergencies, like natural disasters or a pandemic.
“If one were to undertake an exhaustive research program to determine an economic policy which, throughout history, has not only failed repeatedly but caused tremendous damage on the way to inevitable failure, it would be price controls,” Earle told the DCNF. “For 4,000 years political authorities have been trying to freeze prices without causing shortages and extensive economic ruination and [have] been unsuccessful.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Owen Klinsky contributed to this report.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
