In what has been a rarity since President Biden announced he would be suspending his presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris took questions from reporters just a day before the Democratic National Convention is set to get underway in Chicago.
One reporter asked Harris about her economic plan, which has drawn comparisons to policies implemented by Venezuela and the Soviet Union. Harris has proposed a price-fixing plan that would allow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to impose hefty fines on grocery chains and their suppliers if their prices are deemed to be too high. She has also proposed a $25,000 payment for “first generation home buyers” and has proposed “forgiveness” of medical debt mainly for loyal Democratic Party voting blocs.
“You unveiled your economic policies last week. Can you explain how you’re going to pay for those, and can you give me an example of what other policies you want to unveil next?” the reporter asked.
Harris replied with a characteristic “word salad,” throughout which she failed to outline how her policies will be implemented.
“Well, I mean, you just look at it in terms of what we are talking about, for example, around children, and the child tax credit, and extending the EITC. That is at $6,000 for the first year of a child’s life. The return on that investment, in terms of what that will do and what it will pay for will be tremendous,” the vice president said.
She then claimed that the Biden-Harris Administration has “reduced child poverty by 50 percent,” again failing to provide any specifics on the implementation of her plan.
“And then what we’re doing in terms of the tax credits, we know that there’s a great return on investment. And when we increase homeownership in America, what that means in terms of increasing the tax base, not to mention property tax base, what that does to fund schools, again, return on investment,” Harris continued as her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, looked on.
“I think it’s a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment. When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities, and in particular the economy of those communities, and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself.”
Harris’ economic plan has been met with criticism from both sides of the political aisle, including a number of notable left-leading economists. Jason Forman, a Harvard economist who served as a leading economic advisor in the Obama Administration, said Harris’ proposals are “not sensible.”
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Forman said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
Former President Donald Trump has compared Harris’ proposals to those of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“Now, Kamala is reportedly proposing communist price controls. She wants price controls. And if they worked, I’d go along with it too. But they don’t work. They actually have the exact opposite impact and effect. But it leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation. Their Inflation Reduction Act, by the way, was a disaster. It’s what caused the inflation. Their Inflation Reduction Act was a con job,” the former president said during a press conference earlier this week.
“I said, that’s going to cause tremendous inflation, and it did, among other things, like energy. She’s running on the Maduro plan. We call it the Maduro plan, like something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union.”
Walz praised Chinese communism as a system where ‘everyone shares’
‘No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,’ Walz told the Times-Herald in 1989 after arriving home from China.
By Alana Goodman, The Washington Free Beacon
As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which “everyone shares” and gets free food and housing.
“It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares,” Walz said during a lesson on China’s communist system in November 1991.
“The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kg or about 30 pounds of rice per month. They get food and housing.”
Walz’s remarks were reported in a 1991 article in Nebraska’s Alliance Times-Herald that focused on his work on student exchange programs in China. At the time, Walz was teaching social studies at a Nebraska high school.
The unearthed comments could add to concerns about the Democratic vice presidential candidate’s relationship with China, where he traveled extensively for decades and which he says he doesn’t see as an adversary.
Michael Sobolik, a China expert and the author of Countering China’s Great Game, said Walz’s comments to students were a “shockingly naïve description of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.”
“American students need to learn the horrific truths of communism and the horrors this dangerous ideology has wrought over the past century,” said Sobolik. “Gov. Walz should clarify his comments and share his impression of communism in 2024.”
Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.
The candidate “always has been fascinated by Communist China,” according to a profile about him published in Nebraska’s Star-Herald in 1994. As a child, he recalled seeing “pictures of Mao Tse-tung, hung in public places and carried in parades,” the paper reported.
Walz first traveled to China on a year-long teaching fellowship in 1989, months after the Chinese Communist Party slaughtered thousands of pro-democracy activists and student protesters in Tiananmen Square.
Despite the country’s turmoil, Walz—a 25-year-old National Guardsman at the time—wrote in a letter to one of his former college professors that he was “being treated like a king” in China.
In China, Walz said he received a salary that was double the pay of Chinese teachers, was given a decorated apartment with a color TV, and had the only air-conditioned residence on campus. He said he was also thrown parties on his birthday and Christmas.
“No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,” he told the Times-Herald after arriving home. “They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.”
A newspaper photo showed Walz posing with one of his gifts, a paper fan inscribed with a poem by the widow of Communist Party-allied revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen.
After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government.
The trips were “arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,” the Star-Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program, according to a 1993 article in the Star-Herald.
Walz and his wife Gwen held their wedding on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre—with Gwen Walz saying her husband “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember.”
The Walzes spent their honeymoon in China. They also founded a travel company, Educational Travel Adventures Inc., which specialized in trips to China.
Tim Walz maintained public ties to Chinese educational institutes until at least 2007, when he was elected to Congress. He was a visiting fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University until 2007, according to reports.
His connections to China have drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers. On Friday, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) wrote in a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray that he is investigating Walz’s “longstanding connections to [Chinese Communist Party]-connected entities and officials.”
Comer said Walz could be “susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures.”
Walz has more recently promoted U.S. cooperation with China, saying in 2016 that he doesn’t believe “that China necessarily needs to be [in] an adversarial relationship” with the United States.
In another video unearthed by Republicans, Walz said he is “pretty friendly with China.
CLUELESS !!!! Good Lord I cannot stand to look at this waste of space. How did the clinton “everyone should own a house work out?” Friggin idiot
When Kamala says everybody benefits and nobody pays for it then you know how she thinks. It’s foolishness to offer programs that sound so good but are actually impossible to deliver on. Nothing is free!