US Election: – As she announced her White House run, the vice president focused on workers and the middle class.
Kamala Harris is well-known for her outspoken support for abortion rights, her position in the Biden administration’s immigration and border security policies and her career as a California prosecutor and attorney general.
However the economy is a key election topic, and her ideas and policy objectives have not yet been properly stated.
Her past does, however, provide some indications of her objectives, including a preference for low-income workers, women small enterprises and middle-class families.
As vice president Harris has mostly aligned with President Biden on economic matters, and some experts view this as a blueprint. “In general we think she’ll pick up the Biden-Harris mantle” policy analysts at Evercore ISI wrote in a report Tuesday.
Before her time in the administration, she sometimes differed with President Biden—specifically in trade and climate-related policy—often by favouring bigger governmental interventions in the economy.
In an address to campaign personnel on Monday, Clinton discussed some of her economic concerns. As president, she stated that she would advocate for paid family leave and affordable child care.
“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris told reporters. “Because we here know when our middle class is strong, America is strong.” The Harris campaign’s spokespeople did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
The economic challenge
The biggest urgent challenge for Harris may be to overcome Americans’ pessimism about her own administration’s economic legacy. Under Biden, inflation reached a 40-year high in 2022. The consequences varied from increasing food store costs to Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, which made it more difficult for many Americans to afford mortgages and purchase homes.
Inflation has slowed, and many economists expect the Fed to lower interest rates by September. However, Americans are still coping with the fallout—the Labor Department announced last month that consumer prices have risen 19.5% since December 2020.
The vice president understands how high prices affect working families and has long focused on steps geared at relieving those pressures according to a former Harris adviser. who counseled on economic issues.
“What you see in that is a desire to really impact people’s lives on the ground,” the former adviser said, citing topics like prescription price reductions and more broadband access.
According to a former White House adviser, Harris concentrated early in his presidency on assisting small businesses in accessing forgiven loans through the Paycheck Protection Program particularly in minority neighborhoods.
Some aspects of Biden’s economic legacy are more positive. The economy strengthened, and job growth has been solid, boosting the employment rate among Americans in their prime working years—ages 25 to 54—to its highest level since 2001. Wage growth has outpaced inflation particularly among low-income workers.
Tax changes during US Election
As vice president, Harris has supported Biden’s tax strategy, which calls for raising taxes on companies and high-income households while keeping taxes unchanged or lowering them for people earning less than $400,000 annually.
Harris’ signature tax plan as a senator and presidential candidate was the LIFT Act which resembled universal basic income and would have cost approximately $3 trillion over ten years.
Harris’ proposal would have granted a $3,000 tax credit for individuals and a $6,000 credit for married couples. According to the Tax Policy Center, it would have phased away advantages for middle- and higher-income households, leaving only 10% for the top 40% of households.
The LIFT Act failed in Congress, but its essential concept—income support through tax credits—is central to the Biden-Harris economic strategy. In 2021, Democrats increased the child tax benefit and the earned-income tax credit for single workers.
These expansions expired at the end of 2021, but the Biden administration has stated that it intends to renew them.
In 2017, Harris, like all other Senate Democrats, voted against the Republican tax bill, which reduced individual and corporate tax rates and limited some tax incentives. As a presidential candidate in 2020, she advocated for full repeal.
The Biden administration’s approach currently calls for prolonging many of the tax cuts that expire after 2025, along with tax increases on high-income individuals.
Housing costs
Home prices are at all-time highs, and rents remain persistently high creating yet another electoral weakness for the Biden administration.
Harris, as a senator, attempted to address excessive rental rates through legislation known as the Rent Relief Act, which would have granted a tax credit primarily to tenants earning up to $100,000 and spending at least 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities. A group of Democrats continue to advocate for similar legislation.
She has also highlighted her involvement as California attorney general in negotiating settlements with mortgage lenders that went far beyond the initial offer following the foreclosure crisis caused by the 2007-09 recession.
Trade
Harris disagreed with Biden on two major trade treaties as a Senate candidate and later as a senator.
One was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broad trade agreement signed in 2015 by the United States, Japan, and ten other Pacific-region countries. Harris rejected the accord as a Senate candidate in 2016, citing concerns about its effects on workers and the environment.
That trade agreement effectively expired after the election in late 2016, and Trump publicly withdrew from it after taking office.
Harris was one of ten senators who voted against the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement a renegotiated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement that President Trump frequently promotes. She claimed that environmental provisions were insufficient. Biden as a presidential candidate supported the replacement.
Wages and pay
During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Harris proposed a variety of policies targeted at lowering inequality and closing pay inequalities.
One was a proposal to reduce pay gaps between men and women by potentially taxing businesses with at least 100 employees for compensation variances.
Another plan sought to raise teachers’ salary to levels more in line with similar professionals—a disparity that Harris’ team claimed amounted to $13,500 for the average teacher.
A third proposal, aimed at increasing entrepreneurship among Black Americans, proposed $60 billion in investments in STEM education, historically Black colleges, and other minority-serving organizations. Harris also recommended investments to help Black entrepreneurs bring ideas to market and get firms started.
Energy and Climate
As a senator and 2020 presidential candidate, Harris advocated for the Green New Deal, which sought to swiftly transition the US economy away from fossil fuels while rebuilding the country’s energy and transmission infrastructure.
Harris has also advocated for a full ban on fracking, but Biden has simply opposed gas extraction on federal lands. Harris’ more assertive stances were viewed as a potential liability in Pennsylvania, a large gas producer and critical swing state that Biden would narrowly win in 2020.
As vice president in 2022, Harris provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s largest investment in combating climate change. That law contained hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy. and manufacturing projects designed to create a supply chain for batteries and other critical components.
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Source
Wsj.com
