Kamala Harris’ ideas for the housing crisis are even worse than Donald Trump says | Opinion

Last week, I didn’t like it when Donald Trump called Vice President Kamala Harris dumb. And I didn’t like it when he called her a socialist. Presidential campaigns should be about something bigger than grade-school name-calling.

But now Harris and her boss Joe Biden have proposed a series of policies dumber than those a competent communist would impose. Darned if the facts don’t bear Trump out.

A few weeks back, Biden proposed national rent control to keep rents from rising by more than 5% a year. Economists have long known that such policies restrict the supply of new housing and result in a shortage of rental apartments at controlled prices and skyrocketing prices on apartments that aren’t subject to the controls. This has been tried countless times and failed just as often.

Harris wants to expand the folly to home ownership. The problem she has identified is that there aren’t enough homes so prices are rising to the point young couples can’t buy a starter house. She proposes subsidizing demand with $25,000 gifts to help people buy their first home, more if you are the first in your family to buy a home.

This is a nice thought, but it doesn’t solve the problem that there aren’t enough homes for people to buy. All a subsidy will do is raise prices further – too much money chasing too few houses.

To solve the housing problem, you need more houses. For this, Harris proposes giving $40 billion to local governments to find the solution. That’s not likely to work, because it is these very local governments who have strangled housing production in red tape and taxes. The problem is at its worst in California (164,000 square miles) where localities have allowed fewer houses to be built in recent years than were built in the Dallas metro area (9,000 square miles). The problem is so out of control that the state attorney general is suing cities to make them reduce regulation and allow people to build homes.

Now comes Harris with a campaign speech about the economy in which she says, if elected president, she’ll bring price controls to the grocery aisle. The Soviets did this in their communist empire and managed to go years without inflation at the grocery aisle at the cost of lines snaking for blocks to buy what little crappy bread was available. Separate grocery stores for senior members of the Communist Party and those who could pay for groceries in hard currencies kept the problem at bay for the elites.

Not incidentally, price controls were one of a suite of dumb socialist policies that were used to create a famine in Ukraine under Joseph Stalin that led to the deaths of millions. It worked like this. First, Stalin sent prosperous farmers who owned their own land to the gulag and then when the remaining farms couldn’t supply enough grain, he imposed price controls so people could still afford to buy bread. But that took away an incentive for farmers to expand planting and increase supplies.

In the end, the bodies of the starved were stacked in the streets.

Do you know who has price controls for food today? Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico. Is Kamala Harris really saying that the best, the most powerful and most dynamic economy the world has ever seen should throw up its hands and look to Havana for the cure to food price inflation?

Seriously?

I thought Trump was a threat, but at least he won’t put me in a bread line.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com