Not long before Democrats gathered in Chicago for their convention to formally nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential candidate, the presumptive nominee travelled to the battleground state of North Carolina to announce the broad outlines of her economic policy agenda. There, she staked out positions on an issue that most American say is their top priority, and one that earlier polls found favored former President Donald Trump over the Biden administration. However, more recent polling has found Harris either catching up or surpassing Trump on who Americans trust more to manage the economy.
The vice president prefaced her remarks by telling the audience, “Together we will build an opportunity economy” and declared that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” She outlined policies such as the goal of eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans; banning price gouging for groceries and food in a “first-ever” policy; 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.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Matt Bruenig, president of People’s Policy Project a left-wing think tank. Here he assesses some of Vice President Harris’ economic policy proposals, while suggesting alternative progressive programs and strategies.
MATT BRUENIG: I think Harris does not have strong policy views herself, you know, and I mean, she’s not like a politician like Bernie Sanders, let’s say, who he’s got a very strong opinion about what he thinks the policy should be and what America should look like. Kamala is the more traditional, conventional politician who is interested in holding office, interested in winning elections for herself and maybe broadly for the Democratic party.
And from there, kind of is willing to do whatever. Right? So we can kind of see this pretty clearly from looking at Kamala Harris from 2020 to Harris at present. In 2020, if you remember, she endorsed the idea of putting everyone on Medicare or a Medicare Advantage type system. And now her health care plan is to increase subsidies for people who buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.
She’s distancing as much as she can from the Medicare-for-all stuff that she sort of played around with, which which I think just is an indicator that she just doesn’t have strong commitments and she’ll kind of go where she thinks, you know, the energy is. And so for now, I think the way she’s approached this is let’s try to run on stuff that seems pretty small, pretty moderate, that doesn’t expose you to a lot of risk and attack and stuff like that, because ambitious programs often do attract negative attention.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, another policy proposal from Kamala Harris that’s quite popular is the proposal for a $6,000 tax credit for newborns as well as a $3,000 child tax credit, which were, of course, boosted during Covid.
MATT BRUENIG: This is a common benefit in other parts of the world. It’s usually called a maternity grant or it’s called a baby bonus. Finland famously gives all new parents this box of baby items called a baby box and that’s kind of their version of it. People’s Policy Project had previously proposed that, like a baby box for all new parents, but cash works as well.
You can buy a crib with cash. You don’t need the government to send you one. And so, as a general idea, sure, I don’t know $6000, $5000, $4000. You know, who knows what the appropriate amount is. But it seems like the structure she has in mind is for the first year of life, your child tax credit will be $6000. Instead of being what it is now, $2000 or $3000 that she’s proposing for the other years of life.
I think that’s basically a good idea. First year of life. There are a lot of costs: cribs, clothing, strollers. People are out of work taking care of their infants, giving them a little extra money I think makes sense. Now, I do have issues with doing it as a tax credit. This is a problem that I’ve been pointing out for literally a decade, which is that these tax credits don’t reach low-income households and they’re not timed appropriately.
So think about it. If you have a kid in February of 2025 and you want to get this $6,000 credit, well, you can only get the credit when you file your taxes. Well, you don’t file taxes until the early part of next year. So you’ve gone the whole 11 months of the kid’s first year of life without getting the $6,000.
So I don’t think tax credits are a good way to do that because of that timing delay and that it would be much better to just have the Social Security Administration give you the $6,000 whenever you have a kid. The first thing you do in the hospital is you and you enroll them in Social Security. You put them on the list, they get a Social Security number.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t also say, all right, as soon as you enroll your kid in Social Security, they’ll send you a check for $6,000. Very clean, easy way to implement it, whereas the tax credit is much messier and a lot of low-income people don’t file taxes at all.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Matt, obviously these economic proposals from Kamala Harris are about winning votes in the November election. From your point of view, both in terms of sound policy and what’s most important for the lion’s share of Americans, which of these policies do you think are most important to fine tune and really make it specific so that if she does win the election, she can hit the ground running and take action on it.
MATT BRUENIG: To me, I think right now where the U.S. is the most important thing is really to build up social benefits. We really lag the rest of the world in things like paid leave, child care benefits, cash benefits for kids. Our health care system is a disaster.
So that’s where I tend to focus. So in that sense, these tax credits for newborns, the baby bonus and then the child tax credit, and then even the increase in subsidies for Obamacare exchange plans, that’s all good.
That’s all like moving in the right direction. It’s very easy. It’s very tangible. Like I said, I would do it differently. But the basic idea in that focus, I think is very good. Messing around with subsidies for buying homes, I think is a little bit harder to understand. And then these very vague kind of “we’re going to take on the grocery stores.”
“I’m not going to tell you how” I think is probably the least meaningful. With that said, there’s a kind of a question of what happens when she’s president, right? So if she’s president, but they don’t have Democratic majorities in Congress, then she’s going to be very limited to what she can do with executive agencies. Practically, it really depends on how Congress goes and all that.
But if in my ideal world, I’m playing fantasy politics, I’m focusing more on the things that improve our social benefit system over the rest of the proposals.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Matt Bruenig (25:57) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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