I will say this much about Vice President Kamala Harris’ Tuesday “audio townhall” with the radio host known as Charlamagne tha God: She did better than her boss did four years ago with the same host.
That’s not a particularly high bar, I’ll admit. Biden’s interview with Charlamagne, whose nationally syndicated show “The Breakfast Club” is aimed at listeners of color, produced the unfortunate (but absolutely characteristic) Bidenism, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
That line, mercifully, was not uttered, even by the black Kamala Harris — who acts like she has to work to win black votes because the polls show that she does, and that she’s lagging among (as former President Barack Obama so memorably and pointedly put it) “the brothers.”
However, you only needed to listen for six minutes and change of the one-hour event — which took place live in Detroit — for Harris to reveal everything that’s wrong on her priority list. Only, she didn’t get called out for it.
One pre-recorded question asked the Democratic nominee “why are we — and I say we, because my tax dollar is sending the money — why are we sending money to other countries when we desperately need it in our own country, for homeless, housing, resources, for whatever?”
This was, according to the caller, her “determining factor” regarding whether she votes for Kamala. Charlamagne noted that “one of the reasons the ‘America first’ rhetoric resonates [is] because nobody in America would complain about where the money was going if American citizens’ everyday needs were being met.”
So, what say you, Kamala? Do we spend more of our money abroad, or do we keep those resources here at home? Her answer to that zero-sum question? Yes, and also yes.
“We can do it all, and we do,” she began.
“So, first of all, I maintain very strongly America should never pull ourselves away from our responsibility as a world leader, and that is in the best interest of our national security and each one of us, as Americans, and our standing in the world.
Do you support foreign aid?
“That being said, we also have an obligation to American citizens — obviously — and people who are here — to meet their everyday needs and challenges,” she said. [Emphasis mine.]
She then went into a spiel about how Biden-Harris administration done this to bring down prescription drug costs and investing in historically black colleges and universities and black home ownership and small businesses, child tax credit, etc., etc.
The only real pushback she received from Charlamagne tha God was when he quoted the very dead man whom Kamala Harris has named as her favorite living rapper, Tupac Shakur: “We got money for war, but we can’t feed the poor.”
The actual lyrics from Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up,” for those of you who are at all concerned about getting the quote right, are “You know, it’s funny, when it rains it pours / They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.”
That being said, Charlamagne, channeling Tupac, was halfway to an epiphany about what’s very wrong about Harris’ answer. (He went more than halfway back when he later claimed “Trump is about fascism,” but that’s another topic.)
In not falling back on the usual stammering and “look, I come from a middle-class family” drivel, Harris actually revealed something very dangerous about the left’s priorities: They don’t make any.
When Barack Obama used the slogan “Yes We Can” for his 2008 presidential race, little did we know this would become the answer to every line item on the Democrats’ spending bucket list.
Money for struggling American homeowners? Yes, we can. Money for Ukraine? Yes, we can. Money for illegal immigrants (as denoted by the emphasized “people that are here” part of Kamala’s answer, just in case you didn’t catch that wonderful bit of verbal prestidigitation)? Yes, we can.
Money for your crib or a car seat? Yes, we can. Money for a floating pier off the Gaza Strip that buckles when the occasional wave hits it? Yes, we can. Money for [insert kinda-friendly struggling foreign government here]? Yes, we can. Money for HBCUs? Yes, we can. Who’s going to pay for it? Yes, we can.
You may have noticed that last “yes, we can” didn’t fit the question that was being asked. And that’s the point.
Almost every economist outside the Modern Monetary Theory nutjobs concedes there’s an opportunity cost for everything. If you spend a certain amount of money available to the government on cause X, you either have to reduce money to line item Y or add debt to pile Z, which is paid for by future generations with ever-larger interest accrued against the debt.
And that interest isn’t insubstantial right now. Last month, the Treasury Department announced it had, for the first time, spent over $1 trillion on financing the deficit this year — up 30 percent from 2023, according to CNBC. We’re projected to pay $1.158 trillion in financing our debt against the $35.3 trillion national debt we currently carry.
The caller seems to realize this — and so does Charlamagne, in his own way. But to the Democrats, there’ll always be money available. Just tax the ultra-rich, right?
This is the rallying cry of the left. Except there aren’t enough millionaires or billionaires in the country to tax our way to every line-item on Harris’ wish-list, no matter how hard you squeeze them.
(Wealth, it’s worth noting, has a certain level of mobility between the United States and foreign tax havens once taxes become too burdensome — and anyway, it discourages investment in the private sector, which will end up hurting the very people who the Democrats claim to want to help.)
In short: The Democrats have no priorities in terms of how to manage this money, except for permanent creeping government involvement in every area of your life and the lives of others, here and abroad, subsidized by you, one way or another.
In case the Biden administration hasn’t spelled it out for you enough, America, Kamala Harris just said it out loud, in slightly different words.
The center cannot hold. Debt cannot accrue and accrue with no end in sight and no shortage of new arenas to flood with government money. I know it, you know it, and the voter questioning Harris knows it.
Deep down inside, Kamala Harris knows it, too. But she can’t tell you that, lest her electoral chances take a hit.
So she’ll kick the can down the road, hoping things fall apart on someone else’s watch. Is this really a woman we want as our next president?
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