Harris Has an Economic Plan That Will Work for the Middle Class | Opinion

The GOP nominee and former president, Donald Trump, and his fellow Republicans started off this cycle with an enormous advantage on the economy and in about six short months have managed to blow it. Instead of offering daring new ideas about how to lower costs for middle-and working-class families, Trump decided to fixate on his culture war fetishes and then picked a former venture capitalist with the bedside manner of the C-Suite Pierpoint executives on Max’s Industry as his running mate. Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has unveiled policy after policy designed to relieve the precarity and stress of just barely getting by that so many families in America are still forced to endure. As a consequence of these popular ideas, Harris has mostly erased Trump’s lead on the economy in many surveys.
The absurd idea that Trump and the Republican Party are better for the middle class has exactly one source—the fable of the Trump economic boom and the idea that it was driven either by the late 2017 tax giveaway to the wealthy or Trump’s tariff and trade policies. Of course, there’s no denying that some economic developments during the Trump administration were positive—but they’ve mostly been better under the Biden-Harris administration.
The number of manufacturing jobs is higher than they were before the pandemic, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. Real weekly earnings, even adjusted for inflation, are higher than they were in 2019. If the stock market is your jam, it’s been setting record high after record high during the Biden administration. If you have a 401k, I’d encourage you to go check where it is now compared to 2019 and then come back to finish this article. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is over 42,000 as of this writing—for those keeping score at home, that’s 13,000 points higher than it was at its peak just before COVID hit.
And looking forward instead of backwards, only Harris has a real plan for the middle and working classes. Responding to weeks of criticism about a lack of policy substance, the Harris campaign in recent days has unveiled a host of new economic policy ideas that you can find in this 82-page policy booklet that includes a plan to spend $40 billion to bring down home prices, incentives for developers to build affordable housing, a $2,000-a-year cap on prescription drug costs and a dramatic expansion of the child tax credit that would immediately relieve some of the pressure on middle-class families.
Harris and Democrats are the only one of the two parties talking about paid family leave to relieve the crushing burden of new parents either going back to work far too early after the birth of a child or forgoing months or years of income while taking unpaid leave or exiting the workforce. In fact, on issue after issue where middle- and working-class families are getting hammered—increases in health care costs, rises in rent and home prices, spikes in childcare costs, you name it—Trump and his movement are MIA. The guy admitted on national television earlier this month that he still wants to torch the Affordable Care Act but has nothing but “concepts of a plan” to replace it. His big idea to bring down food prices is to impose protectionist barriers on food imports, which will spike costs rather than bring them down.
The Trump campaign’s agenda doesn’t really even pretend to have any ideas about how to fight for the middle class beyond the indiscriminate imposition of tariffs that nearly every economist on the planet who doesn’t work for a thinktank headquartered on Trump’s airplane thinks will cause another round of inflation. The campaign’s “Agenda 47” policy page, if you can call it that, is mostly just GOP culture war red meat with the occasional gesture toward economic policy.
They’re going to end “birth tourism” and right the terrible injustices inflicted years ago on right-wingers by Twitter. He’s going to save the U.S. auto industry from… the record-breaking profits it has enjoyed under the Biden administration. Instead of ideas to reduce housing costs and incentivize development, the Trump-Vance campaign has a profoundly strange plan to build “up to 10 new cities on a very small portion of federal land and award these charters to the best ideas and proposals for development.” That’s right folks, the Trump campaign thinks we need not new houses and apartments but entirely new cities. Okey dokey!
Trump, of course, doesn’t even have the concept of a blueprint of an outline of a plan to address the costs of raising children in America but don’t worry folks, he has a plan for the 6 percent of Americans who homeschool their kids—they can put their own money in a 529 savings account and spend it on themselves. Magic! Trump and Vance claim to be in favor of an expanded tax credit, but Vance did not show up to vote on a bill that would’ve done exactly that in August, while his allies in the Senate torpedoed it. The bill passed the House 357-70. There’s about as much chance of Trump signing an expanded tax credit into law as there is of Joe Biden running a marathon tomorrow.
At the end of the day, the Trump-Vance economic plan is little more than a noun, a verb and “illegal aliens,” and Americans are beginning to see right through it.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.