How Kamala Harris helped crush San Francisco’s middle class

Vice President Kamala Harris argued last week that her economic policies would benefit the middle class more than those of Donald Trump. But in San Francisco, where Harris held power for decades as district attorney, state attorney general and eventually senator, it is the middle class itself that has suffered most from the city’s devastating decline at the hands of Democrats.

“There are lots of cheap options,” Dave, an advertising worker who moved here from the east three years ago, said over lunch. “Of course there are fine dining Michelin-star restaurants, but there’s not much in between.”

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It’s a phenomenon seen across the city, with top-end stores like Armani and Neiman Marcus posting dangerous-looking security guards outside their luxury stores while cheaper clothing stores face increased shoplifting risks.

“We’re just outside, and they can’t get out,” one security guard told me about the thieves.

Similarly, fast food restaurants don’t keep condiments anywhere except behind the counter to prevent theft, and a basic diner breakfast can easily cost $30 including tax and tip.

The dilapidated building at Sutter and Stockton streets. Starbucks There are no chairs, just a few tables to stand at, presumably because the employees can’t control the homeless, addicts, and mentally ill who take over the store. Sitting down and drinking coffee at Starbucks is a basic middle-class luxury across America, but not here.

You can’t even sit down and drink your coffee at this San Francisco Starbucks because homeless people are camping out there, even though they have actual furniture. (David Marcus/Fox News Digital)

Across the street, I can see the vague outline of the now-defunct Joseph A. Banks store, where I could buy a nice tie for $60, rather than the $500 I could easily pay at the nearby Hermes.

Above the Starbucks, Joseph runs a salon, where he is also a personal shopper and fashion writer.

“My husband and I are taxed 50 percent,” he said when I asked him how it was struggling for the middle class here. “We have kids. It’s really hard.”

He says the deterioration began around the turn of the century and has accelerated since then.

In San Francisco, the threshold for entering the middle class is about $90,000 a year. In the average major U.S. city, it’s about $50,000. In fact, five of the top 10 highest thresholds in the country are in Harris’ state of California.

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Another woman told me the secret was to work in the public sector.

“The city is run by public employee unions and they get whatever they want, so it’s very hard to work in the private sector,” she said.

At nearly every level, including Joseph’s tax dollars, political and social resources seem to be spent either on the behalf of the top elites, especially the billionaires at the big tech companies, or on behalf of the poor, for whom a new outlandish and extravagantly expensive policy that is doomed to failure is invented every other day.

One bright spot for the working middle class is tourism: there are a surprising number of European tourists here, which you can tell by their strange sneakers even before they start speaking their strange lunar language.

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“You can make a good living. It’s not that hard,” said one hotel worker I spoke to, who didn’t want to be named, though in fairness he is an immigrant from a small, poor town in Mexico, and his definition of “the good living” doesn’t quite match up with the average American’s.

The number of tourists proves that San Francisco is famous not only in the United States but around the world. It is filled with western romance that rivals Paris and Venice, but for those who live here, the struggle is clear.

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In Chicago this week, Harris will argue that she and the Democratic Party can create an “opportunity economy” for the middle class — a feat that, given her track record in the Bay Area, may be good for venture capitalists and government officials, but will come at a great cost to much of the middle class.

If middle-class support is what drives Harris and California Democrats like her, there is no evidence of that in her hometown — quite the opposite. Voters need to ask themselves how much they want their hometown to look and feel like San Francisco.

To read more articles by David Marcus click here