Trump Demanded It— Now What'll He Say About Kamala’s Economic Agenda…Aside From Shrieking Communist?

Can You Say Family Friendly?

Apparently, Kamala and Tim are laughing off Trump’s disingenuous ranting and raving about “communists”— a step beyond the usual GOP lunacy about “socialists!” She began rolling out her economic agenda yesterday and it’s all about popular proposals to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Jeff Stein and Dan Diamond called it “an aggressively populist economic agenda, providing the most detailed vision yet of her governing priorities.” I was surprised she went so strongly beyond Biden’s economic agenda.

Stein and Diamond wrote that “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.” No doubt the billionaire class reached for their check books today to send more money to the reactionary Trump PACs.

Stein and Diamond— and the rest of the media from what I can tell— seemed shocked that Kamala, who “has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and [has] made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach… embraced more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies.”

Democrap establishment figures have been trying to push her rightward towards GOP policies of tax cuts but “those suggestions were not included in the final package... ‘Harris has made a set of policy choices over the last several weeks that make it clear that the Democratic Party is committed to a pro working-family agenda. The days of “What’s good for free enterprise is good for America’ are over,”’ said Felicia Wong, president of Roosevelt Forward, a left-leaning think tank.”

Conservative critics and Austerity fanatics— seemingly unaware in MMT— immediately set their hair on fire and started running around screaming about the federal budget deficits. And that includes some lunkheaded Democrats who “lamented her recent endorsement of Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on tips, as well as her promises not to raise taxes on Americans earning under $400,000 per year— positions they see as incompatible with Democrats’ ambitions to approve major new expansions of the nation’s safety net. Business leaders who had hoped for a warmer relationship under Harris also balked at being blamed for higher prices in her push against corporate price gouging.”

And yet despite these drawbacks, Democrats have become increasingly convinced that embracing populist economics is key to beating Trump— the top priority for the party through November. Concerns about the economy and inflation have ranked as among voters’ top issues in the 2024 presidential election, and polling has consistently showed that attacking corporate price gouging is popular.

“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 [so-called] 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.”

Perhaps Harris’s most surprising policy announcement was her plan to ban “price gouging” in grocery and food prices. While details were sparse, the measure would include authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to impose large fines on grocery stores that impose “excessive” price hikes on customers, her campaign said. Grocery prices remain a top concern for voters: Even though the rate of increase leveled off this year, grocery prices have jumped 26 percent since 2019, according to Elizabeth Pancotti, director of special initiatives at the Roosevelt Institute.

Still, even some [conservative] Democratic economists balked at that idea and expressed hope that it reflected little more than political messaging. Economists typically say mandatory price-setting creates shortages, by reducing incentives for firms to produce supply, and is the kind of measure far less likely to have been backed under the Clinton or Obama administrations. Biden aides have argued some markets have become distorted by consolidation and require government intervention to be rebalanced on behalf of consumers.

“The good case scenario is price gouging is a message, not a reality, and the bad case scenario is that this is a real proposal,” said Jason Furman, who served as President Barack Obama’s top economist [and apparently never got beyond Economics 101]. “You’ll end up with bigger shortages, less supply and ultimately risk higher prices and worse outcomes for consumers if you try to enforce this in a real way, which I don’t know if they would or wouldn’t do.”

On housing, Harris did less to break with the Biden administration but still opted for a more active set of federal proposals than those thus far endorsed by the White House. Harris endorsed a slew of measures to expand housing supply— including an expansion of tax credits to incentivize housing construction— but also a new $25,000 in federal down-payment assistance to more than 1 million first-time home buyers. (Biden had previously proposed a more limited measure only for first-generation home buyers.) Critics say this plan would probably bid up housing prices, which have already soared since the pandemic.

Harris also pledged to work with states to cancel medical debt for millions of Americans, building on one of herr signature policy issues as vice president. That effort could involve using federal funds to buy and forgive outstanding medical debt from health providers. Harris’s office also recently worked with the state of North Carolina on a first-of-its-kind initiative to forgive the medical debt of 2 million state residents by creating financial incentives for hospitals to relieve medical debt or prevent it from accumulating in the first place. That initiative received federal approval last month, and all 99 eligible hospitals in North Carolina have since committed to participate— a potential model for other states.

The vice president has been steering federal efforts to combat medical debt, by trying to reduce the burden of unpaid medical debt on credit reports. Prompted by those efforts, credit reporting agencies have already removed medical bills from the credit reports of about 30 million Americans.

…Harris’s health-care proposals also lean into liberal efforts to take on the pharmaceutical industry, building on ideas popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and adopted by Biden. The vice president is pledging to expand several provisions contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, including capping the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35 per month, and capping Americans’ annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs at $2,000. Those two provisions are currently in effect for Medicare beneficiaries. Extending them to all Americans could face resistance from the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans.

Harris also wants to ramp up Medicare’s negotiations with drug companies over their most expensive drugs, although her campaign offered no new details. She and Biden celebrated the results of the first year of Medicare negotiations at an event Thursday, where Democrats said that the initiative had cut list prices on 10 pricey drugs and effectively saved $6 billion for taxpayers.

Harris also pledged to target pharmaceutical companies that block competition and “abusive practices” by pharmaceutical middlemen. While her fact sheet offered no new details, the pledges could signal support for ongoing work by the Federal Trade Commission, which has been challenging “junk” drug patents and has been probing pharmacy benefit managers— efforts hailed by the populist wing of the party.

Harris’ plan to expand the child tax credit follows years of fighting between Democrats and Republicans over that policy. GOP lawmakers in Congress uniformly resisted extending Biden’s more generous benefit, which some analysts estimated cut child poverty in half. Harris would change the credit so even the poorest families would receive it. Currently, families need to earn above a certain annual income to receive the child benefit in full. The benefit for newborns is aimed at the high costs families face directly after childbirth: Women who have birth on average pay an additional $3,000 relative to women of the same age who do not, according to the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF, a nonprofit organization focused on health care.

Other policies endorsed by Harris in her five-page policy document included expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for lower-wage workers by up to $1,500, as well as extending subsidies for Americans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

“The days of pivoting to the center to win on economics are over, even though there are good economic reasons to do so, especially on fiscal policy,” said Bill Galston, a former Clinton policy aide.

One of my favorite parts of this agenda is the plan to stop Wall Street predators from buying up and reselling homes in bulk at a higher price. She’ll call on Congress to pass Sherrod Brown’s Stop Predatory Investing Act which is meant to stop communities from being taken advantage of by Wall Street investors and distant, often foreign, landlords. The bill would curtail those practices by removing key tax benefits for major investors who acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes.  

In truth, I had no intention of voting for her since I live in California and she’ll winch state’s 54 electoral votes in a landslide anyway. If I lived in a swing state I would vote for her. BUT… if these are still her policies on Election Day and she doesn’t buckle under the pressure that’s headed her way now, I will vote for her. 

On MSNBC with Chris Hayes last night, Bernie gave Kamala’s economic agenda a thumbs up. “I think what she laid out today was a strong progressive agenda. Obviously, in the weeks and months to come, I think she’s going to add more specificity to some of these proposals, and she’s going to add to it. I have always believed that good policy is good politics, and what she is talking about today is reining in the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs that’s enormously popular; the right thing to do. She’s talking about building 3 million units of affordable housing at a time when we have a housing crisis in Burlington, Vermont, Los Angeles, California, and every place in between. We’ve got to lower the cost of housing in America. She’s talking about ending medical debt, so that a quarter of the people in this country have cancer do not have to deplete their savings or go bankrupt. And she’s talking about controlling the cost of groceries when we know that there’s been massive concentration of ownership in that industry. They spike prices up— and going after them is exactly the right thing to do… and very good politics.”

Conservative dullards— like Furman and others who seem to revel in what they believe is the futility of fighting against price gouging— are already on the attack and there’s an urgent need for pushback... like this from a report by Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek:

Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that shortages and higher raw material costs during the pandemic seemed to work like a coordination tool: Many companies found that they could charge more because their competitors were doing the same. That allowed them to maintain or even increase profits.

That could set a worrisome precedent, she said. In future shocks, companies may not feel much urgency to rapidly fix supply chain problems, aware that they can pull in big profits in the meantime.

And while the businesses are likely to ramp up production and lower prices in the longer term— they would eventually face consumer pushback or lose out to competitors— even a temporary period of very high inflation can be tough on the average person.

“If the worst of times for ordinary people ends up being the best of times for corporations,” she said, people may feel cheated. “Some sort of basic social contract is kind of crumpling.”

She applauded Harris’ plan to combat grocery price gouging.