Lies My Veep Candidates Told Me

Too bad the fact checkers and misinformation monitors have thrown away their own credibility. Sad!

But there's big news on the betting odds:

EBO Win Probabilities as of 2024-10-13 7:09 AM EDT
Candidate EBO Win
Probability
Change
Since
10/6
Donald Trump 53.5% +4.5%
Kamala Harris 45.9% -4.4%
Other 0.6% -0.1%

That's right, reader: Trump kind of zoomed ahead of Kamala this week, regaining the lead he had … before his disastrous debate. To my eye, it's still coin-flip territory, though. And there's plenty of days left for an October surprise.

Also of note:

  • Not the kind of civic literacy you like to see in candidates for high office. Jacob Sullum's column points out that Neither Harris Nor Trump Is a Friend of Free Speech: Both Presidential Candidates (and Their Running Mates) Seem Confused About the First Amendment.

    During last week's vice presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, asked his Republican opponent, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), whether then-President Donald Trump lost his 2020 bid for reelection. Because Vance did not want to choose between contradicting reality and contradicting his running mate, he dodged that question, instead posing one of his own: "Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?"

    Although that pivot was puzzling, it rescued Vance from an uncomfortable situation while highlighting the vice president's disregard for freedom of speech and Walz's alarming misconceptions about the First Amendment. Yet Vance himself seems confused about the constraints imposed by that constitutional guarantee, and so does Trump.

    Vance was referring to the Biden administration's persistent pressure on social media platforms to suppress content that federal officials viewed as dangerous to public health. But even before the pandemic, Harris showed she was no friend to freedom of speech.

    "We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy," Harris, then a senator, said while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. "If you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable."

    Sullum also points out the 1A-hostile ravings of Orange Man:

    Trump likewise champions freedom of speech for himself and his allies while attacking it when it protects his critics and political opponents. If Trump had his way, flag burners would be jailed, purveyors of "fake news" would lose their broadcast licenses, and news outlets would have to pay him damages when their coverage strikes him as unfair.

    Harris and Vance have law degrees, but apparently both zoned out during any Constitutional law class they took.

    All four candidates have (at some point) taken an oath to support the US Constitution, so you'd think they'd want to brush up on that.

  • Kamala also considers the Second Amendment as a "For me, not for thee" thing. Reason's Billy Binion reveals another hypocrisy: Kamala Harris Says She Owns a Handgun—Despite Fighting To Ban Others From Doing the Same.

    When Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in conversation with Oprah Winfrey last month, she dropped a tidbit that may have come as a surprise. "If somebody breaks in my house," she said, "they're getting shot."

    It was, or at least it should have been, one of the more relatable things she's ever said. Whatever your politics—Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Jill Stein groupie, etc.—the right to protect your life and your family when threatened with potentially deadly aggression is something so basic as to transcend partisanship.

    It's a bit less relatable, however, when considering Harris' past advocacy against other people accessing the same type of protection she has.

    She provided more specifics during her recent 60 Minutes interview. "I have a Glock, and I've had it for quite some time," she said. "My background is in law enforcement. And, so there you go."

    Binion goes on to point out her "law enforcement" efforts to ban Glocks for the little people.

  • Just leave the money on the dresser. Jeff Yass and Stephen Moore point out the obvious: Kamala Harris Is Eyeing Your 401(k)

    Kamala Harris keeps changing her tax plan, but her latest proposal is to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%. She would also raise the top capital-gains tax to roughly 32%, the highest since the 1970s.

    Extracting money from those big and faceless corporations with profits in the tens of billions of dollars has populist appeal. But the more accurate way to think of the corporate income tax is that it puts Uncle Sam first in line to take a share of all the profits an American corporation earns. Only after the government takes its pound of flesh does anyone else get a return on his money.

    At a 28% federal corporate tax and an average of roughly a 5% state and local tax, the government would snatch away roughly 33 cents of every dollar of profit. This leaves 67 cents to the shareholders. Those include the more than 100 million Americans who own stock directly or through pension and other retirement funds. Every percentage point that Congress and Ms. Harris raise the tax would dilute the value of the stock owned by the rest of us.

    As many have said: corporations don't pay taxes; they collect taxes. From (in various degrees) their customers, their employees, and their shareholders.

  • But I imagine it's popular. Michael F. Cannon of Cato has some words for Kamala Harris's Irresponsible Proposal to Expand Medicare.

    Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris proposes to expand Medicare by having it subsidize in-home long-term care for enrollees—paying for someone to help them with activities of daily living, that sort of thing.

    One report estimates the proposal could cost the federal treasury $40 billion per year—more than double the amount of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Harris would have to pay for it by squeezing inefficiencies from other parts of Medicare, principally Medicare subsidies for prescription drugs.

    It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal.

    How much more naked vote-buying will we see between now and Election Day?

  • Do you feel "strengthened" yet? Well, don't get your hopes up if Kamala pulls out a win. Matt Weidinger finds a mismatch between Kamala's promises and her proposals: Kamala Harris Priority: Expanding Welfare, Not Strengthening Middle Class.

    Last week’s vice-presidential debate was chock-full of references to the middle class and plans to improve conditions for the middle class. That’s also a common refrain to the stump speech of presidential candidate Kamala Harris: She touts that she comes from the middle class, supports the middle class, and values the work ethic that defines the middle class. Her ties to the middle class are the reason, she suggests, that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” There’s just one problem. Key policies Harris supports are mostly about building up welfare, not the middle class.

    When first unveiling her economic plans in August, Harris noted that she “grew up in a middle-class household” and promised to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class.” In September’s debate with Donald Trump, moderators asked Harris, “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” She issued a non sequitur of an answer that began with, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid.” Asked in an interview to describe “one or two specific things you have in mind” for “bringing down prices and making life more affordable,” she awkwardly began, “Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up in a middle-class family.”

    Weidinger notes that Kamala's proposal to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, was sold as an emergency measure during Covid. Very expensive, and…

    The biggest individual winners? Parents who don’t work at all, who for the first time received full CTC checks, on top of tens of thousands of dollars in other welfare benefits they can already collect.

    The losers? Reader, if you have to ask, you're probably the proverbial sucker at the poker table.

  • Other than that, though, it's fine. Eric Boehm discovers a small problem with a proposed solution for immigration: Trump's Deportation Plan Would Cost Nearly $1 Trillion and Wreck the Economy.

    Former President Donald Trump's promise to carry out "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history" would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.

    The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a "devastating" hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America's gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.

    I'm a waffler on immigration, but it's only because I can't decide which party's policies are worse.

  • Nice party you had there. Kevin D. Williamson looks at The Decimated GOP. (Probably Dispatch-paywalled, sorry.)

    My faith in “We the People” is, you might say, limited. But a significant share of them have shown themselves resistant to Trump’s brand of populist pornography. Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 Republican primary, less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election, and less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. During his presidency, Trump never got above 50 percent approval. He only broke the 50-percent approval-rating barrier recently, and then only briefly, when it became clear that Joe Biden simply cannot do the job of president now, much less in four years. As soon as Harris got into the race, Trump was back under 50 percent—and he has stayed there. 

    Trump’s low standing in the polls has been in line with his serial failures at the polling place. In 2016, he edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton—one of the most unlikeable figures in the modern history of the Democratic Party—with a few thousand fortuitously distributed votes putting him on top in the Electoral College despite his smaller overall vote share. Since then, Trump has been ballot-box poison for Republicans in every election in which he has been a factor. Republicans have lost control of both houses of Congress and lost scores of seats at the state and local level. And, in 2020, Trump managed to lose to a witless senescent human eggplant who barely bothered to campaign against him. Kamala Harris was the worst-performing contender in the 2020 Democratic primary, but she is at the moment (caveats, caveats, harrumph, etc.) poised to hand Trump yet another much-deserved electoral beating. 

    The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps

    Don't hold back, KDW. Tell us what you really think.