Harris unveils populist economic plans
Ahead of her planned speech today in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a dozen proposed policies for “lowering costs for American families” (Washington Post):
The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life.
The last item followed a suggestion earlier this month from JD Vance, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, that the credit be raised from $2,000 per child to $5,000. Harris is also calling for restoring the Biden administration’s child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021, which raised the benefit for most families from $2,000 per child to $3,000.
The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall. Harris has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and her team had made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach. But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies.
Donald Trump, Republicans, and their industrialist backers will come after Harris with torches and pitchforks. Financing details for the policies were not immediately available, but Harris and her party have made a commitment to a “pro working-family agenda,” The Post adds. Their calculation is that victory in November lies down that path.
“Vice President Harris faces a dilemma: On the one hand, America is on a fiscally unsustainable path, and if we’re going to embark on some of the more ambitious programs she’d like to pursue we need more revenue,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax policy expert at the New York University School of Law. “On the other hand, democracy is in peril, and that crisis feels — and is — more imminent than the fiscal crisis, and I think she’s made the correct calculus that sacrificing on fiscal policy for a few hundred thousand middle-class voters in the battleground states is worth it.”
A butter knife to a gunfight?
Policy proposals signal to serious people that Harris is a serious presidential candidate. But Donald Trump operates in a different universe altogether, one of lies and insults. Dana Milbank catalogues a host of Trump’s insults in his Washington Post column this morning in addition to Trump anecdotes that are simply “bananas.” Less-MAGA Republicans are begging Trump to stop. But insults are all he has.
Trump’s disastrous pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, dismissed concerns about a campaign built on insults and “a whole bunch of nonsense.” Vance thinks giving offense is just fine (via Talking Points Memo_:
“The reason people love him is because he is his own man, he is unfiltered and he lets the American people see who he is,” Vance said during a campaign rally in Byron Center, Michigan. “We’d much rather have an American president who is who he is, who’s willing to offend us, who’s willing to tell us the truth, who isn’t a fake who hides behind a teleprompter but lets the American people see exactly who he is.”
So let’s hope Harris is not bringing a policy butter knife to a gunfight. A substantial number of Americans are happy to live in an authoritarian Trumpistan. They are willing to risk themselves and the western alliance to bring it about.
They have abandoned democratic principles to establish a white, Christian nationalist homeland where the land of the free once stood. “Truth, justice, and the American way” is not the 1950s to which they hope to return. They condemn liberal aspirations for equality of opportunity as a demand for equality of outcomes while backing a convict whose foot soldiers are at work rigging election outcomes.
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