Sen. Kamala Harris pushes Rent Relief Act, the ultimate jackpot for ‘free stuff Dems’

California Sen. Kamala Harris, a big-government Democrat, wants to subsidize the rent of Americans who live in apartments, condos or townhouses they cannot afford.

“Nationally, over 21M Americans spend more than 30% of their paychecks on rent. That’s absurd,” she tweeted Friday. “I introduced the #RentReliefAct to help ease the burden. This equals more money in people’s pockets at the end of the year.”

Set to be officially unveiled Tuesday, the so-called Rent Relief Act would provide renters who earn less than $100,000 a year and spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities with a taxpayer-funded tax credit. Keep in mind utilities might conceivably include bills for luxuries like television, Internet and phone service.

A couple problems immediately stick out like a sore thumb. The most liberal cities tend to host the highest rents. Why? According to Huntington Beach assemblyman Travis Allen, it’s because liberal cities invariably feature “a tangled web of environmental and land-use policies that make it nearly impossible for developers to bring affordable housing to the marketplace.”

“Imagine government regulations making it so expensive to build cars that automobile manufacturers could only earn a profit by selling luxury vehicles. That will give you an idea of what progressive politicians have done to housing development in California,” he wrote last year in the San Francisco Chronicle.

His thesis was that leftist politicians like Harris, California’s former attorney general, created the rent problem via their left-wing policies. And now these same politicians want to use their left-wing policies again to try and fix it. See a problem with that? Many on Twitter certainly did:

Lynn Fisher, a housing policy expert with the American Enterprise Institute, agrees.

“We would be asking the whole United States to subsidize the bad behavior of some locales that are artificially pushing up rents by not allowing more building to happen,” Fisher noted to Reason magazine.

Second, it’s a verifiable fact that anything the government tries to subsidize inevitably rises in price, sometimes exponentially. Just look at what happened to healthcare premiums after the passage of the so-called Affordable Care Act in 2010: They skyrocketed to unprecedented highs.

The same would likely occur in this scenario. It’s not hard to imagine landlords purposefully raising their rent so that they too may benefit from Harris’ subsidy:

And then there’re the two most important point of all, which are that it’s on individual people to choose living arrangements that fit their budgets, and it’s completely normal to pay 25 to 30 percent, if not higher, on rent:

Look:

As usual, it all boils down to individual choices and personal responsibility, two things leftists like Harris hate so much they’d prefer they be removed out of the equation altogether.

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Vivek Saxena

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