Kamala Harris has long been seen as the front-runner of Joe Biden’s possible running mates, but after the police killing of George Floyd put racial issues at the center of Joe Biden’s campaign for the presidency, the stocks of other black contenders with less criminal justice baggage, such as Val Demings and Keisha Lance Bottoms, have risen. Never one to let a crisis go to waste, Harris is out with her own coronavirus cash promise even after she was spotted violating social distancing rules at a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington.
So it should come as no surprise that Harris has ramped up her audition reel with the promise of more free stuff at the expense of taxpayers. Along with fellow former presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders and endangered Sen. Ed Markey, Harris has introduced a bill to give “every U.S. resident” (including noncitizens who are here illegally) who earns less than $120,000 a monthly payment of $2,000 for the entirety of the coronavirus pandemic and three months after. It would also be applied retroactively back into March. Payments would only be reduced for those making more than six figures.
With a double-digit unemployment rate, 40 million jobs destroyed, and small businesses gutted permanently across the country, there’s no question that horrific government policies, from the CDC lying about the efficacy of wearing masks to Gov. Andrew Cuomo forcing nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, have caused extraordinary pain for the public. Small businesses will likely require more federal funds to preserve their payrolls, and most understand that individuals need more cash payments.
But the entire point of the push for need-blind payments at the beginning of the pandemic was the need for urgency. We can now afford to means-test cash assistance.
Harris knows this, of course, but with her Clintonian political instincts, she’s trying to woo the intractably liberal Biden from the Left. The California senator spent an entire presidential campaign refusing to embrace a universal basic income but is now cosplaying vice president in the Senate.
It’s cynical and, given our exploding deficit, politically and financially impossible. But she has a running mate slot to win.
