Kamala Harris blunders into a fatal justification for Green New Deal

The danger of throwing around terminology that she doesn't understand has not yet occurred to Kamala Harris. The junior senator from California clearly isn't ready for the rigor of a presidential campaign. Having entered politics with the advantage of being Willie Brown's mistress, and having made her climb up the electoral ladder in the leftist hothouse environment of San Francisco and then the one-party state of California, she has never been seriously challenged to explain her policies. Platitudes such as even her campaign slogan, "Kamala Harris for the People," don't work very well, considering that it derives from her appearances in court as a prosecutor, where she imprisoned many people for the same sort of marijuana usage she now boasts of herself. In an era of progressive discontent over "mass incarceration," drawing attention to her role in incarcerating masses of Californians is not too smart.

Photo credit: kamalaharris.org. Yesterday, in an interview with CNN's John King, she blundered into a position much worse, at least for people able to deal with ideas and faintly knowledgeable of economics or finance. (I realize that this excludes most Democrats and especially Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but the sort of deep-pocket campaign donors she needs understand the problem. She is just too stupid to be trusted in the presidency.)



CNN screen grab via Grabien. The key part: One of the things I admire and respect is the measurement that is captured in three letters, roi. What's the return on the investment. People in the private sector understand this. It's not about a cost. It's about an investment. And the question should be, is it worth the cost in terms of the investment potential? We are going to get back more than we put in? If she had the faintest clue, she would realize that investment money flows toward high ROI projects without any government help. That is the logic of a market economy (which she clearly does not understand). The only reason that justifies government intervention in energy generation is the problem that "green energy" generally has a miserable return on investment. Does she remember Solyndra? It was in her own state of California that taxpayers took a bath of hundreds of millions of dollars on that project. Writing on these pages, and in his book Dumb Energy, Norman Rogers explains and documents exactly this phenomenon. Kamala Harris has gotten away with this sort of facile throwing around of concepts she doesn't understand because first she was Willie Brown's girlfriend (nobody in Bay Area with any judgment needlessly makes an enemy of Willie Brown), and then, once in office, she was a mixed-race identity-politics twofer with plenty of people seeing her ending up in higher office. Her current status as a perceived leader among the Democrats' presidential field is entirely based on these factors, not on any merit as a visionary thinker and leader.