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August 16, 2024 - 7:30pm
Today Kamala Harris released her plan to, in the words of her campaign, ‘bring down costs for American families’. The campaign claims that it will alleviate the ‘sharpest pain points’ of an economy that has been running too hot for too long but could now be cooling into a damaging recession.
The plan is strategically inoffensive; it is a signal to the bipartisan establishment, which spans from Mitt Romney to Elizabeth Warren, that there is nothing to fear. And although her Republican rival Donald Trump said that Harris was a ‘communist‘, her proposals — tax incentives for homebuilders, down payment assistance, cheaper medicine — are hardly radical.
Harris has enjoyed a stretch of uncommonly good luck since President Joe Biden announced that he was no longer planning to seek re-election, with a Democratic challenger never materializing. Memes deployed to torment Harris — the coconut tree, the Venn diagrams, ‘unburdened by what has been’ — flipped instantly into fandom. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, emerged as ‘the internet’s newest boyfriend’. Meanwhile, Tim Walz, the Minnesota Governor whom she picked as her running mate, became an unlikely Gen Z darling.
That is why Harris does not feel the need to take any risks with her policy platform. When she was a candidate in 2019, she proposed a Medicare-for-all policy that was, the pundits declared, too radical for many moderate Americans. She was eventually forced to moderate her position on healthcare, but the political damage had been done. And a lesson had been learned.
Something deeper is at work, too, which signals a shrinkage of our political imagination. Universal healthcare was proposed by Richard Nixon and, later, by the Heritage Foundation, whose plans were put into place by Romney, then the Republican Governor of Massachusetts. But now, Democratic fears of a second Trump term have put all major policy questions to the side. If the future of American democracy is on the line, as this way of thinking goes, who could possibly care what Harris thinks about the estate tax? One could argue that if the US postwar economy had not dispossessed so many Americans, there would have been no rationale for Trump in the first place, but that’s another conversation.
The most meaningful criticism of Harris’s economic plans came from Catherine Rampell, the economics columnist for the Washington Post, who compared the Vice President’s proposal to lower grocery costs by cracking down on price-gouging to the worst excesses of ‘communist’ central planning. ‘It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is,’ Rampell wrote.
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