Thread by @JDVance

It has been 50 days since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

In the dead of night yesterday, she finally released her campaign policy page. Here's what I think of it 🧵

⁨⁨1) Kamala Harris claims she wants to cut taxes for middle class families, but here's what's in her plan:

IRS Audits for working families: Getting audited is a horrendous experience, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to hire 87,000 IRS agents to audit more people. As recently as last summer, 63% of new audits fell taxpayers earning less than $200,000.

The IRS, like Kamala Harris, claims that it’s not going to increase audits on people making under $400K, but the Treasury Inspector General stated the agency’s strategic plan, “did not include specifics on how the IRS was going to ensure it met this commitment.” That’s because they have no intention of ensuring they’re not going to audit middle class families—that’s where they’re going to find the money to pay for their massive spending proposals.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, under questioning in the House, could not deny that 90 percent of new audits under the IRA would be on households earning less than $400,000. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the majority of additional taxes the IRS recommended from audits from 2010-2021 came from taxpayers with income less than $200,000.

It’s even harder to pretend that taxing working men and women isn’t their focus when you think about the reporting requirement Biden-Harris signed into law to require businesses to fill out a 1099K form on transactions over $600 made using third-party payment platforms. The reporting threshold before their bill was $20,000.

There’s no minimum number of transactions in their bill, so a single transaction over $600 that triggers the reporting requirement creates more paperwork. Even Senate Democrats have backed different bills to blunt the impact of this enormously burdensome mandate.

The Government Accountability Office found this aspect of the Harris tax record would result in at least 30 million new 1099K forms getting sent out in 2024. The Joint Committee on Taxation found that over 90 percent of the tax burden will fall on middle class families and gig workers.

The Biden-Harris tax plan, as explicitly outlined in their formal budget request to Congress would increase taxes by $5 trillion. That’s going to stack on top of her inflationary climate spending bills and drag the economy down further. It’s been estimated that “the tax changes in the Biden-Harris budget would reduce long-run GDP by 1.6 percent…wages by 1.1 percent, and employment by about 666,000 full-time equivalent jobs.”

That’s nearly a million people out of work and lower wages for everyone in order to shift money towards the Harris Green New Deal—as she said to CNN in her first interview after nearly a month as the Democratic nominee, her values haven’t changed on that policy, which she supported enthusiastically when she was in the Senate.

All in all, the Biden-Harris record has been a massive wealth transfer from working people to the Green New Deal’s constituencies—the Harris tax plan is going to be more of the same, no matter what kind of claims she makes during the campaign.⁩

2) Kamala claims she wants to make rent more affordable and home ownership more attainable, but that's not what her plan would do at all.

Kamala wants to give every first time homebuyer a $25,000 check toward downpayment assistance. What she fails to leave out is that this would likely raise the average home price by the same amount, making her plan moot. We also haven't heard how the debt-burdened federal government would pay for such a plan.

There’s also no guarantee that this down payment assistance will be limited to citizens. The campaign has yet to lay out what requirements there will be, beyond being a first time homebuyer and having a two year history of rental payments. One reporter has indicated that only an SSN or taxpayer identification number will be required. If that’s true, then this would leave open the door for millions of illegal immigrants to get this assistance. And this wouldn’t be the first time housing assistance has gone to noncitizens—there are a number of federal housing subsidies that noncitizens are eligible for: including the HOME Investment Partnership Program and Treasury’s pandemic era Emergency rental assistance program.

But under Kamala, the potential for assistance to go to illegals isn’t the only issue. Couple that with Kamala’s CFPB and DOJ effectively forcing banks to lend to noncitizens. They’ve rewritten guidance mandating that banks cannot deny loan applications strictly on citizenship grounds, even though citizenship and residence status bear a large impact on loan repayment prospects.

Vice President Harris also mentions how she'll spur the construction of "3 million more rental units." While she outlines an admirable plan, it's tough to take it seriously. This Vice President has overseen an administration that has enacted new red tape for multi-family and single-family construction. We've seen her Housing and Urban Development Department enact green energy requirements for new rental units, mandatory strictly-cosmetic updates to public housing units, and more regulations that will make it harder to grow the rental supply.

That's not the end of it. The Vice President seems to think that the ongoing housing crisis is strictly due to a supply problem, but it's not. Her policies have also driven demand for housing through the roof, particularly when looking at the price and availability of rental units.

As I've outlined before, and as academic research supports, mass immigration drives up demand, threatens the American dream of homeownership, and makes housing less affordable for working Americans.

When a city’s immigrant population increases, the area’s home prices and rental costs rise by a comparable amount. But the effects vary by neighborhood: home values are negatively correlated with the immigrant concentration. The result: only current homeowners in non-immigrant, wealthy neighborhoods stand to benefit from mass immigration. Working-class residents see their rental costs soar, and their home values decline.

It's common sense, we can't fix our housing crisis until we address the crisis at the border.⁩

3) Vice President Harris claims she'll "take on the everyday obstacles and red tape that can make it harder to grow a small business."

However, under her administration, the SEC has promulgated at least 47 rulemakings, the majority of which have not been mandated by Congress, and we've seen Treasury enact burdensome compliance regulations, with some even aimed at small businesses, like the Administration's preferred implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act.

This doesn't sound like cutting red tape to me. It sounds like the opposite: enacting overbearing regulations that stifle innovation and kill job creation.

4) Kamala Harris claims she wants to make our education system a pathway to the middle class.

Take it from me, a working-class kid who went to Ohio State on the GI Bill and then to Yale: education can absolutely be pathway to the American Dream. But I’m not naive enough to think that our current system works for everyone. It obviously doesn’t. Fewer than one-in-five American students goes smoothly from high school to college to a career that uses their degree.

Kamala Harris doesn’t want to address these problems. Instead, she wants to double down on the failures of our education system. She wants taxpayers to write off more student loans, to increase subsidies that will only drive up tuition costs, and to send even more money to some of the worst-performing universities in the country.

Here’s what I’d like to know: What will Harris say to Pennsylvania ironworkers who are upset that they have to pay for someone else’s college degree?

The answer, I’m afraid, is absolutely nothing. Kamala Harris, like the rest of our education establishment, treats the majority of hard-working Americans without a college degree as an afterthought. We’re the only developed country in the world without a distinct, vocational education pathway, and yet Kamala Harris thinks the solution is to send even more money to universities.⁩

5) Kamala says she wants to invest in affordable child care, but again that's not what her plan would do:

As I’ve said before, I want our public policy to increase access to affordable childcare options and empower parents with the flexibility and resources to make the best childcare decisions for their family.

Harris says that she wants families to “afford high-quality child care.” That may sound nice, but as always, Harris is light on detail and heavy on slogans. What might she mean by this?

It’s tough to say, but the best indication would be the national childcare plan that she’s already laid out with President Biden as par of their “Build Back Better” plan. We all know how those policies turned out: skyrocketing inflation.

But the childcare provisions of their plan were so extreme that not even a Democrat-controlled Congress could pass them. They wouldn’t have worked for many American families.

Most parents who use a paid childcare center say they prefer a faith-based provider. What would Harris’s plan do for them? Nothing. Childcare providers based in a house of worship would have been excluded from funding opportunities. Other faith-based providers would be subject to additional regulations in order to access funding that might not have been able to meet.

Many parents prefer to stay at home with a young child or have a loved-one watch them. Would Harris’s plan support these families? Not at all. Her proposal was only supports childcare centers and would offer no support to families that prefer not to send their children to daycare.

Ensuring families have access to affordable childcare is an important challenge for our policy to help tackle. But the answer cannot be to force families into Kamala’s preferred one-size-fits-all model. We can support parents and their children without leaving millions of families behind.⁩

6) Kamala Harris made it clear that she views American energy policy as a part of her wider fight against global warming. For example, she takes credit for passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which she claims lowered household energy costs while building a green energy economy. The reality of the IRA’s climate record, however, is much different.

CBS News reported earlier this month that the cost of electricity has increased more than 28.5 percent since 2019, with the average American now paying nearly $300 each month just in utilities. These higher costs can be attributed to a shrinking supply of American electricity. More specifically, Harris's environmental policies have shuttered reliable coal power plants, slowed the approval of new natural gas plants and failed to enact permitting reform for American generation and transmission infrastructure. Instead, they have placed an increasing burden on less reliable sources of energy, such as solar and wind. These renewable sources are more dependent on conducive weather than coal and gas plants, which means they are most prone to failure exactly when Americans are most reliant on electricity to do things like heat their homes. Kamala’s energy policies are making Americans poorer and more vulnerable to extreme weather.

As for the “new green energy economy,” let us look at the IRA’s effort to make American roads more conducive to electric vehicles. The IRA allocated $7.5 billion to build new EV charging stations along highways. In the almost two years since the IRA became law, the Biden-Harris administration has built just eight charging stations. This program is part of the wider Harris push to replace gas-powered cars with EVs, which has also fizzled. Many automakers, including Ford and General Motors, are delaying or curtailing EV rollouts amid lower-than-expected consumer demand, despite rosy predictions from administration officials and $7,500 federal tax credits to buy new EVs. Meanwhile, dealers are complaining that they cannot move the EV inventory they already have.

Kamala Harris also pledges to advance “environmental justice” and pays fealty to international climate agreements. At best, the policies spawned by progressive and foreign ideologues will go the way of the EV push: billions of tax dollars wasted with American energy and auto workers left with uncertain futures. At worst, Kamala’s climate policies will increase energy costs for all Americans, degrade their standard of living with new climate mandates, leave them vulnerable to dangerous weather and make America a worse place to live.

We all want cleaner air and water. What we do not want is more climate hysteria.⁩

7) Kamala Harris says she wants to secure our borders. Her record tells a different story:

Harris touts her record prosecuting international criminals as California’s Attorney General. One of the reasons why California has so much migrant crime is because it is a sanctuary state that shields illegal aliens from deportation. Hence foreign criminals feel more protected in California. Another thing Attorney General Harris did as California’s AG was write a 2015 letter to the US Senate defending California’s sanctuary state policies and opposing a bill that would penalize the state’s noncooperation with federal immigration law. It is safe to assume that there would have been a lot fewer migrant criminals to prosecute in California if the state and AG Kamala had allowed ICE agents to do their jobs and deport them.

Kamala Harris then claims to have supported a bipartisan border security bill that would have deployed more agents and drug scanners. I believe she is referring to Sen. Chris Murphy’s Border Act of 2024 (S.4361). What she won’t tell you is that the bill also codifies catch-and-release, allows up to 1.8 million illegals to enter before the border could be closed, gives billions of taxpayer dollars to the same NGOs that are driving the invasion and expands the executive parole powers used by Biden instead of limiting them. The bill’s author Sen. Murphy put it best when he admitted that, under his bill, “the border never closes.” I think all of that is totally unacceptable when our nation is facing a historic border crisis, which is why I and my Republican colleagues opposed it. Kamala Harris should have instead pushed for a standalone vote on new border agents and scanners.

Kamala Harris also brags that, thanks to her efforts, border crossings are currently at 4-year lows. It is worth remembering that almost four years ago, on their first day in office, Biden and Harris issued executive orders that stopped border wall construction and stopped deportations. They then rescinded Trump’s Remain In Mexico policy, allowing every migrant with a dubious asylum claim to enter America while waiting in an years-long case backlog. As a direct result of these actions, America endured consecutive months record-breaking illegal immigration. Only once their Border Act was rejected, and border security consistently polled as a top concern of voters, did Biden and Harris issue orders that give the appearance that they care about illegal border crossings. She cannot take credit for nominally lower border crossing numbers after she spent almost four years holding the border wide open.

But the most destructive part of the Kamala Harris border plan is where she says that she wants to give her 8.5+ million illegal aliens an “earned pathway to citizenship,” which means rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty and the right to vote in our next election. Promising amnesty and citizenship will create a gigantic magnet for illegal immigration that will entice people around the world to race across our borders.

If there’s a takeaway from this section, it’s that Kamala opened our borders to 8.5+ million illegal aliens, lied about it for almost four years, blamed others when she got caught and now wants to reward those illegals with citizenship.⁩

8) Kamala Harris has said she wants to support veterans and their families. She has completely failed to do so as Vice President:

Right from the beginning, Biden and Harris charted a bad course, putting U.S. soldiers in harm's way. In Afghanistan, as the situation turned chaotic in 2021, a lot more could and should have been done to keep our people safe. People on the ground warned Biden and Harris - through a dissent channel cable - that the situation would get chaotic. The administration didn't listen. And so when the time came to move our people out of Kabul, we ended up running the operation out of Kabul's own airport, right in the city. It was chaos, and ISIS terrorists exploited that chaos to murder 13 U.S. service members at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021.

And the thing that gets me is this: Kamala Harris never once bothered to pick up the phone and call those families. Kamala Harris never once supported an investigation into the decisions that led to Abbey Gate. If Kamala Harris cared about veterans, she would have demanded accountability. She didn't.

I think our veterans and their families deserve a genuine investigation into what happened at Abbey Gate. That's about accountability, yes, but it's also about making sure it doesn't happen again.

The same mistakes that led to our losing people at Abbey Gate were repeated again and again and again. At Tower 22 in Jordan on January 28, 2024, we lost three service members to a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia. Different time, different place, different enemy - but a lot of the same mistakes. By that time, our forces had been under fire in Syria and Iraq dozens, hundreds of times since October 7 - and we weren't shooting back. The situation was chaotic, we weren't in control, it was only a matter of time before our people paid the price.

Take your pick of military operations under this administration - from the pier to nowhere in Gaza to the Red Sea operation against Houthi militants, the common thread running through them is our soldiers get thrown into situations where they are sitting ducks, where they very often come to serious harm, with no serious thought given to how we're going to get the other side to stop shooting at us.

That absolutely has to stop, and it will stop under President Trump. When Russian forces attacked us in Syria on President Trump's watch, we killed them. When we took on ISIS in the Middle East, we destroyed them. Our goal should never be to send our troops into harm's way as some kind of symbol of resolve. We send our troops in to win. That's how it should be.⁩