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For weeks, Republicans have complained that Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has skimped on detailed proposal for how she would bring the American economy out of the post-pandemic period that has seen the highest inflation in decades.
On Wednesday, she answered by laying out plans to center her presidency around building and strengthening the American middle class and describing the US election as a choice between what she described as two “fundamentally different” visions of the economy held by her and former president Donald Trump, her Republican opponent.
Harris said Trump, a wealthy former real estate developer and reality television star who is currently facing criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions, is “only interested in making life better for himself and people like himself, the wealthiest of Americans.”
By contrast, she said her own middle-class upbringing, in which she was raised by a single mother, left her committed to working with the private sector to boost the fortunes of small business and empower American workers.
Responding to Trump and his allies, who frequently falsely accuse her of being a “communist” or a “Marxist,” the vice president instead told an audience of around 400 at the Pittsburgh Economic Club that she is “a capitalist” who believes in “free and fair market.”
“I understand the pressures of making ends meet. I grew up in a middle class family, and while we were more fortunate than many, I still remember my mother sitting at that yellow Formica table ... just trying to make sure that she paid them off by the end of the month, like so many Americans, just trying to make it all work,” she said.
“Every day, millions of Americans are sitting around their own kitchen tables and facing their own financial pressures, because over the past several decades, our economy has grown better and better for those at the very top and increasingly difficult for those trying to attain build and hold on a middle class life.”
That, Harris said, is “what this election is all about.”
The vice president said Trump, who has based his proposed second-term economic agenda around unilaterally imposing tariffs — essentially sales taxes — on a large swath of imports, “intends to take America backward to the failed policies of the past” and “has no intention to grow our middle class.”
“In sum, his agenda would weaken the economy and hurt working people and the middle class. You see, for Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own big skyscrapers, not those who actually build them, not thosewWho wire them, not those who mop the floors,” she said.
Harris, who has frequently spoken of what she calls an “opportunity economy,” laid out plans to implement an economic plan based not around ideology, but around what she called “common sense” and “what actually works” by being “pragmatic” in her approach.
The vice president described tracked closely with her record as a prosecutor in California, during which she led litigation against predatory lenders, for-profit scam colleges and unscruplulous health insurers.
Instead of Trump’s approach — heavy on corporate tax cuts and tariffs that most experts say would supercharge inflation — she pledged to “identify common sense solutions to help Americans buy a home, start a business and build wealth,”
That starts, she said, with a proposed $6,000 tax credit for new parents “to help families cover everything from car seats to cribs” while cutting child care and elder care costs and implementing paid leave programs that would benefit a “sandwich generation” that is caring both for children and aging parents.
Citing her own experience caring for her mother after a cancer diagnosis, Harris said lowering the costs of caregiving will also allow Americans to “go to work and pursue their economic aspirations.”
She also pledged to cut housing costs by cutting “the red tape that stops homes from being built” and targeting corporate price gouging in the rental markets.
At the same time, Harris said her administration would drive down housing costs by working with developers to build three million new homes and rentals targeted at middle-class buyers and renters, while targeting buyers with down payment assistance as much as $25,000.
Harris’s focus on housing policy appears to be tailor-made for the exact sort of middle class voters who she will need to defeat Trump in less than 50 days.
As interest rates soared over the last few years, members of the Baby Boomer generation have increasingly chosen to stay in their homes to continue to enjoy the low mortgage rates they locked in during the pre-pandemic period.
This has led to a dearth of single-family homes suitable for millennials and other generations looking to buy into the housing market, which has made it harder for those generations to find solid financial footing.
The ex-president, whose father, Fred C Trump, was a prolific builder of single-family housing and rental units, hasn’t put forth his own plan for increasing housing stock.
Instead, he’s made increasingly unhinged claims about housing costs being connected to illegal immigration and has pledged to somehow lower costs and increase supply by deporting tens of millions of undocumented immigrants.
By putting forth proposals in this area, it appears Harris has decided to take the fight directly to Trump on the economy at a critical time, giving undecided voters a reason to vote for her instead of counting on them to be turned off by and vote against Trump.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday shows Trump holding just a two-point lead when it comes to who voters think would handle “the economy, unemployment and jobs” better.
That’s down 11 points from the same survey taken in July.
