More Like COMMIE-LA Harris, Are We Right?

Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled her first economic policy proposal of the campaign Friday — with more on the way, she promised — with a speech constructed around the theme of “building what I call an opportunity economy.”

The Harris plan, not surprisingly, sticks with Joe Biden’s model of economic prosperity that grows “from the bottom up and the middle class out,” although Harris conspicuously didn’t repeat that line, which is just fine since the emphasis is the same. As Harris put it, “Everyone, regardless of who they are or where they start, has an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children.”

“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency because I strongly believe when the middle class is strong, America is strong. […] So in the weeks to come, I will address in greater detail my plans to build an opportunity economy.”

Here’s the video of the speech, and then let’s dive into the policy stuff!

For all the panic that Harris’s plan introduces strict communist price controls for food and requires you have the Mark of the Beast to buy or sell, the ban on price gouging for groceries that got virtually all the attention prior to the release of the plan is a relatively small part of the document, discussed only in fairly general terms.

Harris would submit a request to Congress in her first 100 days to pass “clear rules of the road” that would spell out what constitutes price gouging and excessive profits, and to authorize the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to “investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules” — all of which would need to be turned into actual legislation by Congress, followed by the usual rule-making process at the FTC. As far as we can tell, no tumbrels or even a dictatorship of the proletariat.

We do like, however, Harris’s promise that her administration will

crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers.

Competition is good for keeping prices down, and too many damn mergers are not. And yes, the Biden-Harris FTC’s lawsuit against the merger of grocery chains Albertsons and Kroger, filed in February, is still grinding ahead. Good!

There’s far more in the proposal about housing, and no, Harris isn’t calling for price limits on houses either. But there are some good ideas here, like calling for the construction of three million new housing units within four years, with a pledge to coordinate between the White House and industry on how to create enough affordable housing.

Specifically, Harris calls for expanding the housing supply itself through:

• A builder tax credit to promote construction of starter homes.

• An expansion of the existing tax credit for building affordable rental housing.

• A $40 billion federal “Innovative Housing Construction Fund” that would help state and local governments boost affordable housing with innovative financing and construction methods. This would double a $20 billion plan already proposed by the Biden-Harris administration in its fiscal 2025 budget request.

The plan’s biggest housing idea is another Biden budget proposal that’s being carried over: a $25,000 subsidy to first-time homebuyers, to help more people become homeowners. Honestly, considering the old cliché about how owning a house turns people into conservatives, Republicans oughta support this one. Critics of the idea say it would drive up housing prices since it would bring more bidders into the market, but hey, if there’s also a big expansion of new housing, wouldn’t that pressure be offset? Haha, look at the guy who’ll die renting trying to make sense of the housing market!

Look, I was pretty tired when I wrote that. Harris renews a couple of Biden priorities for bringing down prescription drug costs, and has an all new pledge to help people who are swimming in medical debt.

Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (Friday was the second anniversary of its signing, in fact), which capped insulin at $35 a month for everyone on Medicare and also achieved the decades-long Democratic priority of negotiating lower Medicare drug prices. Harris wants to expand on that by telling Congress to get it right this time and extend the insulin price cap to everyone, since Republicans blocked that in 2022. She also pledges to “allow Medicare to accelerate the speed of negotiations so the prices of more drugs come down faster,” although of course the devil will be in the details, or possibly in the Big Pharma executive suites, BOOM.

And in another exciting proposal, Harris promises to “work with states to cancel medical debt for millions of Americans,” which would be huge, and a follow-up to Harris’s successful effort to remove medical debt from almost all Americans’ credit reports.

Finally, the plan includes a something old and something new to help people put food on their families: Harris wants to restore the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit that helped get millions of kids out of poverty before it expired, and what’s more, make it permanent. To do that, of course, she’d need Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, and probably enough Dems in the Senate to finally do away with the filibuster, since the cost would come to about $1.2 trillion over a decade. Upside: Millions and millions of kids not growing up in poverty means they’ll learn better, be more economically productive, less likely to commit crimes, and all those things a functioning industrial democracy is supposed to freaking value.

The new idea, which is terrific, would give middle- and low-income families a fully refundable $6,000 tax credit when they have a babby, during the little critter’s first year of life. That would offset some of the considerable costs of having a baby, and maybe lead to a spike in kids named “Tim” or “Kamala” in the kindergarten classes of 2030 and beyond.

So hey: You pundits wanted policy, not vibes? Plenty to talk about there, with a lot more to come. We think it’s pretty good, too!

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[WaPo (gift link) / Harris-Walz campaign / AP]

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