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to her in a policy briefing somewhere along the line, and the phrase stuck. Now, Harris thinks she’s the Warren Buffett of deficit spending.

The concept of investment tends to be inapt in the context of government spending. In the private sector, when someone takes the risk of investing in a business or product and if it doesn’t work, he or she pays the price. This ensures a measure of accountability and rigor that is lacking in government.

There’s a reason that no one ever confuses the Department of Health and Human Services with Apple, Inc.

That doesn’t mean that some projects don’t create real returns. By making New York the country’s most commercially vibrant city, opening up the West to settlement and drastically reducing transportation costs, the Erie Canal was indeed a great investment. Spending $330 billion during World War II to defeat the Axis powers and to make the United States the world’s preeminent power was worth it by any measure.

These are the exceptions, though. There’s been so much so-called investment by the federal government in general and the Biden administration in particular, that it’s a wonder that the budget hasn’t already balanced itself. Instead, the deficit is nearly $2 trillion a year, and the debt is $34 trillion.

Where’s the return? There is some, no doubt, but it is overwhelmed by the geyser of spending on every priority, from the Administration for Children and Families to the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.

Harris is proposing to layer on another $1.7 trillion in deficit spending.

It’s not just that there will be no return to almost all of it, government intervention often has the opposite of its intended effect by driving up prices. There’s a reason that health care, higher education and housing cost so much. Regardless, the answer from the likes of Kamala Harris is always more intervention. An element of her program is more subsidies “to help Americans afford health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace.” Wasn’t that what the ACA itself was supposed to do?

So, no, the Harris spending program won’t pay for itself any more than the Biden program did, or for that matter, the Trump, Obama or Bush program did. Magical realism — or magical unrealism — in budgeting is an entrenched, bipartisan phenomenon in Washington. That’s why we’ve gotten so much “investing” with so little return, except an ever-escalating debt and a series of worthless pledges about impending fiscal probity.

Like any huckster working in a boiler room, Harris is hoping to find people credulous enough to believe what’s too good to be true.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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