Kamala Harris Finally Details What She Means by ‘A New Way Forward’

It is understandable to be dismayed at the different standards applied to Democratic policy and Republican policy. Trump can be the most incoherent man on the planet with plans that Wall Street traders are literally betting on creating two of the three conditions for stagflation, the worst thing that can happen to an economy, but Kamala Harris has largely been the candidate knocked for a relative lack of policy specifics in her vibes-based campaign. It shows up consistently in the polls with undecided voters saying that they don’t know enough about what she plans to do with her power should she win.

Kamala Harris released a 76-page policy platform yesterday that should answer a lot of people’s questions, while still raising some more. It is another demonstration of the tightrope she is trying to walk where she tries to keep the policy-motivated portion of the Democratic base engaged while appealing to independents and running as the most generic Democrat who ever generically Democrated every time she steps into public.

But thankfully, this policy document contains details that shine a much bigger light on what she plans to do with her power, and a lot of it is good, but it is very much the classic kind of Democratic policymaking that largely works around the edges of problems instead of addressing them head-on. There is no Great Society or New Deal or even Inflation Reduction Act in this platform to be found. Kamala Harris mostly just wants to give America an avalanche of tax cuts and credits in the hope that it will continue to grow the pie, but in a more equitable manner. Here’s how she plans to do it.

Actual Support for Families

The overall theme of Harris’s platform is either to do things that have worked in the past or pick up the pieces of Biden’s platform that did not pass through Congress. While this is not as robust and broad-based a policy vision as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it does follow in its footsteps of trying to invest in a middle-out economy.

If elected president, Kamala Harris would “restor[e] the Expanded Child Tax Credit to up to $3,600 to help more than 100 million Americans.” This is the same figure that Biden established in a temporary program during the pandemic that is one of the most successful in human history. It cut child poverty nearly in half, and Congress letting it expire after this immense success is one of the greatest examples of the American government’s true value system you will ever see. This gigantic killing machine is designed for the wealth class, not poor kids.

And Kamala Harris wants to change that to some degree by restoring one of the most effective policies this country has ever created. She also has proposed a new $6,000 tax cut for “middle-income and low-income families for the first year of their child’s life,” and she wants to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for middle- and low-income couples who do not have kids to “cut their taxes by up to $1,500.” This suite of tax cuts and credits would do a lot to help a lot of people.

She also says she will “fight for affordable, high-quality child care and preschool” without going into detail of what she specifically plans to “fight for,” in a preview of how a portion of the rest of this document will unfold.

Trying to Lower Costs

Harris wants to “invest in building resilient food supply chains,” and “revitalize competition in food and grocery prices” while “giving small businesses, grocers, and growers the resources to compete, reinjecting competition back into our food markets and lowering costs for Americans.” This is where the document gets a bit light on specifics, but if you understand the dynamics plaguing this subject, you can see the problems and policies she’s getting at.

Harris says she will “call on Congress to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging,” and this section gives us Lina Khan stans hope that her reign of terror for monopolists atop the FTC will continue into a Harris administration. Reid Hoffman may try to spend millions if not billions to get Khan out, but Harris’s entire section on price-gouging and the bipartisan efforts she cites in states like Texas, New York, Florida and North Carolina makes it clear that Lina Khan’s policy vision still has purchase in a campaign making googly eyes at the capitalist class in their public statements.

The vice president also wants to lower health care costs, as she plans to “expand and make permanent the tax credit enhancements for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans” and “strengthen health care for veterans” by building on the PACT Act that has expanded screenings and health care for veterans. Harris also says she will “help tackle the opioid crisis and help Americans access treatment,” although there is no specific policy here outside asserting that she will “continue to stand-up to drug traffickers and pharmaceutical companies.” She also references competition a few times in this section, so this could be another situation where her policy is hopefully just to let Lina Khan cook.

Harris gets more specific when discussing her plans to cut prescription drug costs, as she wants to “extend the $35 cap on insulin and $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs to all Americans” and “accelerate the speed of Medicare prescription drug negotiations.” She again talks about increasing competition and “crack[ing] down on pharmaceutical companies that block competition and abusive practices by pharmaceutical middlemen.” She also proposes to “continue the work to eliminate junk fees and ensure their disclosure, and robustly address scams of all kinds from robocalls and texts to financial fraud, particularly those that target seniors.”

I do not know how she could possibly accomplish all of this without Lina Khan, or at least continuing Khan’s aggressive anti-monopolist policies in her administration. It sure looks like Reid Hoffman lost this battle, at least for now.

Harris Has Part of a Climate Change Plan

Energy costs are another target of Kamala Harris’s, and this is where the worst and vaguest part of her platform is found, as she is touting increased American oil production on page 30, something that history will not look fondly upon as our climate crisis worsens around us each and every day. She doesn’t even try to articulate any kind of grand policy vision to fully address the largest existential threat to mankind’s future in the entire document, outside of including clean energy as one of her many industrial investment focuses.

She largely just touts the success of the clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, and does not provide much more detail on her plans here, with amorphous phrases like she “remains committed to supporting U.S. energy production growth so that we never again have to rely on foreign oil.” What kinds of energy? How much growth for each kind? That doesn’t seem like a question Kamala Harris wants to answer with this document.

After another paragraph touting the success of Biden’s signature legislation and the expansion of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program to $22 billion, she ends it by saying “As President, she will continue that work to lower American families’ energy costs.”

The only concrete climate policy I can glean from this document outside of green investment is her pledge to “hold polluters accountable,” “protect public lands,” and her administration plans to “unlock upgrades, efficiencies, and faster construction of a lower-cost and more resilient electrical grid to speed up deployment of cutting-edge technologies.”

So basically, her climate plan is to cut red tape, invest in green technologies, go after polluters after they have polluted, and let Biden’s IRA do the rest of the work. This tiny section is a massive failure by Team Harris. The climate charts are not okay, we cannot afford to keep kicking the can down the road when the end of the road is in sight.

Affordable Housing

Harris wants to expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, a successful policy that has generated over 3.5 million affordable housing units since its inception in the 1986 Tax Reform Act. She does not state specifics as to what she would like to expand it to, but she says it will be “historic.” The vice president also wants to create the Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, which she says, “would support the new construction or rehabilitation of over 400,000 owner-occupied homes in lower income communities.” These tax credits would be allocated to states who would then allocate them to specific projects based on credit needed to make them viable, and it is only available for “single-family affordable homes that will be occupied by the owner.”

America’s foremost tax incentive enthusiast also wants to offer a tax cut “specifically targeted at encouraging homebuilders to build affordable homes for first-time homebuyers,” and she notes that the National Association of Homebuilders backs this proposal.

But she is not made up of all tax cuts and credits, as Harris proposed a $40 billion fund for state and local governments, private developers, homebuilders and other funds to invest in “innovative strategies to expand the housing supply.” She plays Lina Khan’s music in this section too, saying she will take on abusive corporate landlords in a bid to lower housing costs. Kamala Harris also wants to stop “Wall Street investors from buying up and marking up homes in bulk,” while also offering the $25,000 down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers that drove a bunch of pretend economists on the right insane when she first pitched it earlier this year.

These policies look like they should do a lot to help ameliorate America’s housing crisis, and the Fed pivoting to an easing cycle should only help make these investments more attractive.

Investing in Manufacturing and Small Business

Harris set a goal to “launch a record 25 million applications to launch new business in the next four years,” breaking the Biden administration’s record mark of 19 million new business applications in his term. One of the ways she plans to do this is, say it with me now, expand a tax credit!

While it is kind of funny seeing this same hammer come down on this same nail over and over again over the course of 76 pages, this proposal is no slouch. The current startup expense deduction is $5,000. Given that most startups lose money, especially their first year, $5,000 is not a lot of help.

Harris proposes to expand this tenfold to $50,000. That’s a lot more help.

She is also “proposing to fund a network of new and existing federal, state, local, and private business incubators, and small business innovation hubs” to help reap the benefits of Biden’s immense success in the battle with China over semiconductors.

There is also a sentence that jumped out at me in this section, as she wrote about defending the Affordable Care Act and making some tax credits from it permanent, she slipped that she “will work with states to forgive medical debt” in this section about making businesses easier to launch. Commence the eye emojis.

Harris says she will also launch a small business expansion fund that “would enable community banks and community development financial institutions to cover interest costs while small businesses are expanding,” and she will “allocate one-third of federal contract dollars to small businesses” with an eye on investing in rural communities with entities like the Rural Partners Network.

She also will cut red tape in the form of taxes by creating a standard deduction in the tax code for small businesses that is similar to the one available to individuals, which would save them a lot of time and money. Harris also finds the most common ground between libertarians and liberals, promising to reduce “the barriers of excessive occupational licensing requirements,” while championing a litany of other ideas to cut red tape for small businesses.

In manufacturing, she promises to focus on “clean iron and steel,” as well as “AI, aerospace, data centers, and clean energy.” Take a wild guess what her signature proposal is to accomplish her goals in these sectors!

Harris claims that the “transformational America Forward tax credit” will “prioritize doing right by American workers, protecting the right to organize and supporting investments that take place in longstanding manufacturing, farming, and energy communities…especially to those who commit to retool or rebuild an existing facility.” Her entire manufacturing plan will have $100 billion in new investments, and in a fact sheet, said “will be paid for by a portion of the proceeds of international tax reform.”

Only the wonks know whether this supposed “transformational” tax credit will do what they want it to do once they parse the details, but targeting it at existing manufacturing bases is both good policy and good politics.

Kind of Sort of Taxing the Rich

Reflecting her proven desire to do populist politics without angering the capitalist class, she opens this section by saying that billionaires “should not be able to pay an effective tax rate lower than a teacher or firefighter” (without ever putting a number to that tax rate), then she turns around and proposes to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, acknowledging that figure is “still well below the rate that was in place before the Trump tax cuts under both Democratic and Republican presidents.”

As this document proves, the Trump tax cuts are something of a bipartisan policy both parties endorse to varying degrees.

Her biggest attack on the wealthy may come in her desire to “reform the international tax system so that corporations can no longer get big rewards for shifting jobs and profits overseas.” Everyone in Apple’s Ireland office probably shuddered reading that sentence knowing their very reason for existence is now at risk in this election.

For Americans making $1 million a year or more, she proposes raising the tax rate on their long-term capital gains from 20 percent to 28 percent, the original rate from its establishment in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform, which is still below the rate proposed in the Biden Administration’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget. She notes that “this approach strikes the right balance,” which is basically the summary of all her policy intentions.

Conclusion

This is definitely a big improvement on the bits and pieces she released before, save for her refusal to even try to seriously address the climate crisis (the word “climate” appears just twice in the 76-page text, two times less than “AI”), and it should answer a lot of the questions undecided voters have been raising in these polls that likely spooked the Harris campaign. However, because so much of it is “the Inflation Reduction Act is good and I will continue that work,” it’s hard to gauge exactly how she prioritizes this suite of policies. She’s not going to get all of these done, especially if the Democrats don’t win both chambers of Congress, so when the rubber meets the road, which ones will she fight for? That’s still a bit unclear from how she laid all of this out.

It’s good that a lot of her policies have moved away from the top-down Democratic neoliberal vision of the economy, and she is definitely trying to run as something of a second Biden term, but she leans a lot on promising to continue the work on bills that have already passed. She has done a lot to provide more clarity on her specific intentions as President of Lower- and Middle-Class Tax Credits and Cuts, but she still needs to do more, especially on climate.