Vice President Kamala Harris has a problem: Large majorities of Americans believe the economy is on the wrong track, and more say the Biden-Harris administration’s policies have hurt their personal finances rather than helped, and that their personal economic situation is getting worse rather than better. That’s clearly a major headwind for Harris’s presidential hopes.

Until now, her and President Joe Biden’s response to these concerns has been to tell people: Don’t believe your lying eyes (or pocketbooks), the economy is doing a lot better than you think. As the Trump campaign pointed out in a new ad, until recently Harris was giving speeches boasting that “Bidenomics is working.” That message has failed miserably, and for good reason: It does not conform with the lived reality of most Americans.

To understand why, consider this simple statistic: Over the past three years, Americans have gone from the highest levels of household savings ever recorded to among the lowest levels. At the same time, they have accumulated the highest level of personal debt ever recorded. In the Biden-Harris administration’s first year in office, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reports, U.S. households were sitting on a record $2.1 trillion in excess savings — meaning additional savings built up during the pandemic recession above the prerecession trend. Nonetheless, as president of the Senate, Harris cast the deciding vote to pass the catastrophically misnamed “American Rescue Plan” with only Democratic votes — a reckless $1.9 trillion social spending bill that even former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who served high in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, warned would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”

It did just that, unleashing the worst inflation in four decades. As inflation skyrocketed, Americans spent down their savings, and racked up debt trying to keep up.

Meanwhile, consumer debt has reached a record high of $17.8 trillion — a $3.15 trillion increase since Biden and Harris took office. Credit card debt has surpassed $1.14 trillion for the first time, almost doubling on Biden and Harris’s watch. Today, the average American is carrying $6,329 in credit card debt — an increase of $1,534 during this presidency. (Total debt increased on Donald Trump’s watch, too, but more slowly and in a time of historically low interest rates.)

Because the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to fight inflation, Americans are paying the highest interest on that record debt in 23 years. The average credit card interest rate in America today is 24.92 percent, the highest level on record. So not only are many Americans’ credit cards maxed out, their debt is compounding more quickly each month.

A basket of groceries that cost $100 before Biden and Harris were elected now costs more than $125 — and last year more than 60 percent of Americans used credit card debt, payday loans, savings and “Buy Now, Pay Later” options to pay for those groceries, according to a May report by the Urban Institute. Nearly 4 in 10 Americans have been charged a late fee in the past year because they could not pay their bills on time. Many also can’t afford to buy a home because housing prices have skyrocketed and mortgage rates have more than doubled from 2.77 percent when Biden and Harris took office to 6.49 percent today. But renting offers little relief because residential rents have risen 22 percent. The costs of electricity and other utilities, home insurance and child care have shot up as well. As Trump put it in his interview with Elon Musk this week, “Four years ago, five years ago, people were saving a lot of money. Today, they’re using all their money and borrowing money just to live. It’s a horrible thing that’s happening.”

He’s right. And this reality puts Harris in a no-win situation. A new Financial Times-University of Michigan poll finds that more than 60 percent of Americans say Harris should make major changes to Biden’s economic policies. But as the sitting vice president, she can’t disavow the economic policies she has helped preside over for the past four years. She wasn’t just a passive bystander to Bidenomics; she was one of its architects, casting the tiebreaking votes that enabled the inflation-inducing spending the Biden-Harris administration unleashed. Where does she differ from Biden? If she had won the 2020 election instead of Biden, there is good reason to believe she would have tried to spend even more. During her campaign for the Democratic nomination, she proposed a mind-boggling $45.5 trillion in new spending, according to Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl — more than 10 times the $4.3 trillion in new spending she and Biden enacted. She also promised to ban fracking, which would have driven up gas and electricity prices even higher. So, Harris can’t defend the administration’s record without appearing as hopelessly out of touch as Biden. She can’t disown the disastrous economic policies she helped implement. And as a committed leftist, who has endorsed the full Democratic so­cialist agenda from the Green New Deal to Medicare-for-all, the only different course she can honestly offer is to spend even more — which would make inflation far worse.

On Friday, Harris doubled down on socialism with a widely panned economic policy speech, in which she deflected blame for inflation onto big business and proposed a federal ban on “price gouging” for groceries and other essential items.

Her best new economic idea is her proposal to eliminate federal taxes on tips (despite the administration having created a new program last year to crack down on tipped service industry workers) — but that one she plagiarized, without attribution, from Trump. In all, Harris’s proposals amount to almost $2 trillion in new government spending — virtually the same as the disastrous Biden-Harris “American Rescue Plan” that unleashed the inflation Americans are struggling with today. In other words, she has learned nothing from the economic failures of the Biden-Harris administration.

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