Kamala Harris cares a lot about the care economy
For proof, look no further than the economic she announced today featuring a new Child Tax Credit on top of the 2021 version plus proposals to lower rent, grocery prices and health care.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. The general election is in 81 days and the Democratic National Convention starts in three. Guess who flies to Chicago to cover it and hasn’t started packing?
Moments ago, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered the first big policy speech of her campaign. During her remarks, she proposed several economic policies for her first 100 days in office—some will feel familiar if you were with me during the epic Build Back Better saga a couple of years ago. And some ideas are fresh ideas that match her priorities. By accident, I scheduled this post to be sent at noon … tomorrow instead of today. It’s still worth reading, so I’m sending it now.
The Harris campaign said today’s proposals are just one aspect of the vice president’s broader economic agenda, which also focuses on safeguarding and enhancing Social Security and Medicare, fostering collaboration among labor unions, small businesses, and major corporations to create jobs and investing in the US. Future planks will zero in on reducing the costs of education, child care, and long-term care and empowering workers to unite and negotiate for better wages. But for now, she’s provided enough to chew on, as you’ll read below.
Before you get there, though, here’s some news from the White House worth sharing: This morning, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation to designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Springfield, Illinois.
The national monument will protect 1.57 acres of federal land in Springfield, Illinois, and will be managed by the Interior Department’s National Park Service. The designation will tell the story of the violent mob that attacked the Black community in Springfield and lynched two Black Americans, an event emblematic of a larger series of lynchings and racist mob violence that targeted Black communities across the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Our history is not just about the past, it’s about our present and our future,” President Biden said. “The Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument will help us remember an unspeakable attack on the Black community and honor the Americans who came together in its aftermath to help deliver on the promise of civil rights.”
President Biden previously designated, expanded or restored 10 national monuments, most recently in May when he expanded the San Gabriel Mountains and the Berryessa Snow Mountains, both in California. The last civil rights national monument was the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument last July on the 82nd anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth.
Now, back to the vice president’s economic agenda:
The plan focuses on lowering costs in four key areas: housing, health care, child care and food.
Bobby Kogan, the senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told me that Harris’s economic policy platform aligns with her belief that the role of the president is to make sure the government is working on people in their communities.
“The purpose of government is to make people’s lives better,” Kogan said. “And what we’ve seen here is that her biggest first things are about making sure people’s pocketbooks are better and to make sure families are able to better afford their lives.”
Much of President Biden’s domestic policy legacy will be defined by the resurgence of American manufacturing, the reinforcement of the US semiconductor industry and the rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
But if Harris is elected with governing majorities in Congress, her presidency could be remembered for its sweeping investments in the care economy, which she alluded to in her first speech as the presumptive nominee two days after Biden dropped his candidacy and endorsed hers.
“She made a point of emphasizing the care economy,” Kogan told me. “So right away, she was signaling to everyone that that was something that was important to her to making sure that middle-class families were taken care of.”
The care proposals mix remnants from the failed Build Back Better Act that Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) left on the cutting room floor in 2022 with new policies dreamed up by the Harris camp.
Among Harris’s most ambitious proposals is a new $6,000 Child Tax Credit for middle-income and low-income families for the first year of their child’s life to offset the income many new parents who take unpaid time off from their jobs are forced to do without and the costs of cribs, diapers, car seats and other expenses.
Harris’s plan also calls for the expanded Child Tax Credit passed in the American Rescue Plan in 2021 to be made permanent. The expanded CTC enabled qualifying families to offset $3,000 per child up to age 17 and $3,600 per child under age 6. The credit, which cut child poverty in half in six months, was also fully refundable, with half available in monthly installments between $250 and $300. (Most Senate Republicans blocked a procedural vote earlier this month to advance legislation to partially restore the 2021 CTC.)
But a frustration among my childless friends is that the current US tax code is optimized for parents.
According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 44 percent of childless adults between the ages of 18 and 49 said they are “not too likely” or “not likely at all” to have children in the future, as a seven-percent increase from 2018 when 37 percent of adults said the same thing. (56 percent of childless adults in the survey said they simply didn't want children, while others cited financial reasons, medical reasons and lack of a partner.)
Harris’s platform includes modest relief for childless singles and couples in low-income jobs in the form of an expanded $1,500 Earned Income Tax Credit specifically targeted to frontline workers who are paid poverty wages in jobs that keep the economy humming.
Under her plan, Americans would also receive a $700 tax credit on their health insurance premiums in the Affordable Care Marketplace.
Overall, the Harris campaign says the vice president’s plan will provide tax relief to more than 100 million Americans and ensure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in new taxes.
Another pain point for too many Americans is homeownership.
The Harris plan would provide working families who have paid their rent on time for two years and are buying their first home up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance. This expands on a Biden administration proposal to provide $25,000 in downpayment assistance only for 400,000 first-generation home buyers—or homebuyers whose parents don’t own a home—and a $10,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. The Harris campaign says this expansion would enable over four million first-time buyers over four years to get significant down payment assistance.
Harris will call for three million new housing united to be built in the next four years to increase supply and lower mortgage costs. She will also propose the first-ever tax incentive for homebuilders who build starter homes sold to first-time homebuyers, a complement to the Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit that encourages investment in homes that would otherwise be too costly or difficult to develop or rehabilitate.
The vice president will propose a $40 billion innovation fund to empower local governments to fund local solutions to build housing, support innovative methods of construction financing, and empower developers and homebuilders to design and build affordable rental and housing solutions.
And since the rent is too damn high, Harris will call on Congress to pass legislation to remove generous tax breaks for major investors who acquire single-family rental homes in bulk. She will also ask lawmakers to send a bill to her desk that cracks down on corporations that collude with each other to dramatically increase rents.
“I think you ought to view both demand- and supply-side things as a team,” Kogan said. “We do demand-side things to make sure that particularly people who are have lower means are not left in the dust. And that's why the demand-side stuff is so important. At the same time, if you only do demand-side stuff, then you're in trouble.”
Kogan told me it was likely intentional that housing was the first issue her economic plan addressed and that the first two proposals were focused on increasing supply.
“This is why this proposal is so great because it's trying to help people actually make the purchase with the demand-side boost, and then also, at the same time working on the supply,” he said.
It’s these big swings that had progressives in Congress excited about Harris’s candidacy.
“We’ve already heard some early things from her in terms of care economy work and a lot of those kinds of unresolved issues from Build Back Better, including social infrastructure like child care, expanded social safety nets and more,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told me late last month.
Kogan added that you should view these proposals as Harris saying yes, and to Build Back Better.
“Here's her first policy rollout and she not only centered the care economy parts of Build Back Better, but she also called to expand parts of them,” he said. “We still are going to retain the paid leave and childcare and stuff like that. And then going on and saying, that's great. And we want to go further.“
Harris’s speech comes on the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, a law she cast the tie-breaking vote on to empower Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs in Medicare Part D to $2,000 starting next January and co-pays for insulin to $35 for Medicare recipients and eliminated costs altogether on vaccines for older adults and penalize companies that raise prices faster than the rate of inflation.
Under her economic plan, Harris will propose a universal $35 cap on insulin and out-of-pocket expenses at $2000 and accelerate the speed of negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies so the prices of more drugs come down faster.
Food inflation remains the source of high costs in many households.
The Harris plan would call for the first federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries in her first 100 days in office.
If elected, she would also clarify existing rules so corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers for excessive profits and advocate for substantive support for smaller businesses, like grocery stores, meat processors, farmers, and ranchers so those industries can become more competitive.
Additionally, the vice president will empower the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.
And while the campaign said Harris understands free markets are an environment for normal price fluctuations, she believes there’s a major difference between fair pricing and the excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business.
Of course, many of these proposals will require congressional action. And until the balance of power is resolved in the November election, it’s hard to suss out which ones have a better shot of surviving the legislative process, especially as the tax debate heats up ahead of the expiration of most of the 2017 tax cuts.
“Absolutely, some of these things require acts of Congress, and others don’t,” Kogan said. “And for the ones that require an act of Congress, then depending on what the proposal is, you could either see true, bipartisan, partial bipartisan, or no bipartisan support.”
Although the polls have shifted in her favor, a majority of Americans still trust Trump more than the vice president on the economy. As the most senior official of the incumbent party who is also still relatively undefined on the national stage, Harris has the tricky task of uplifting the popular aspects of Bidenomics—investing in the middle class, raising taxes on wealthy people and big corporations, and empowering workers—while introducing bold policies that prove she has ideas of her own.
For what it’s worth, President Biden told reporters he was confident Harris would build on—not run away from—his legacy.
“It doesn’t matter what the hell you call it, the economy is going to continue,” he said on Thursday before traveling to Maryland to announce agreements between Medicare and the manufacturers of 10 of the most-prescribed and expensive drugs on the market to lower their prices. “With all the legislation we passed, it’s working. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s working.”
Finally, it’s worth noting the location of the speech is uncoincidental.
Former President Trump held a rally in western North Carolina on Wednesday that his campaign pitched as an economic speech but devolved into the usual airing of grievances you’ve come to expect from him.
Democrats at every level are bullish about Harris’s chances to take the state for several reasons.
First, she’s closed Trump’s lead in North Carolina in a matter of weeks. Biden was down almost seven points to the former president on the day he dropped out. But Trump is only leading Harris by half a point, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Number two: North Carolina was Trump’s narrowest victory in 2020 and a closer result than his 3.67 percent margin over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)’‘s 2.04 percent margin over former President Barack Obama in 2012. (Obama was the last Democrat to win the state in a presidential election.) And North Carolina was the only state in 2020 in which Trump won with less than 50 percent of the vote.
Third, the vice president is a familiar face. Today’s speech will mark her eighth visit to North Carolina this year. She’s held events across the state on gun violence prevention, health care and clean energy in her official capacity. She had two campaign rallies last month, with the second coming just days before Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her to be the Democratic nominee. Harris also visited Black Wall Street in Durham this past March and stopped in Charlotte in June as part of her economic opportunity tour to connect with Black men, a target demographic of the Trump campaign.
Team Harris has also invested in a robust ground game. The campaign confirmed to me this morning that it currently operates 20 field offices in North Carolina, with six more expected in several rural counties to support the presidential campaign and elect Democrats down the ballot as well.
Finally, Democrats see the state as an electoral jewel because of its significance to Trump’s path to victory. As political strategist Doug Sosnick explained to Politico this morning, North Carolina is the former president’s “linchpin” that can thrust him over the required 270 electoral votes through Georgia or Arizona plus one of the Blue Wall and Sun Belt battleground states. If Harris handles her business in the other states she’s likely to win, it’s hard to see how Trump keeps her out of the White House without the Tar Heel State.
Do you have questions about the election? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll find the answers.