To tackle the pressing financial issues that voters are deeply concerned about and which Republican Donald Trump is attempting to drag her into, Vice President Kamala Harris is advocating a comprehensive package of economic policies that would reduce the cost of living for Americans and introduce new tax breaks.
Harris is set to visit North Carolina, a key battleground state, on Friday to present her agenda, which includes a proposal to prohibit grocery price gouging on a federal level. For some first-time homebuyers, she is offering a $25,000 down payment assistance program, and she is also offering tax breaks to builders of starter houses.
Tax cuts for families, the middle class, and the poor are what Harris is advocating for. A maximum of $3,600 for youngsters and $6,000 for those in their first year of life would be available under her proposed child tax credit expansion. According to campaign projections, Harris’s proposal to broaden the earned income tax credit to include lower-income individuals without children would result in a $1,500 reduction in their effective tax rate.
The Affordable Care Act is another tool Harris plans to use to bring down health insurance rates.
Congress would have to approve most of the modifications, which is highly unlikely given the present political climate.
During a rally at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday, Trump attacked Harris, calling her “a radical California liberal who broke the economy.” Harris is attempting to counter this by avoiding the accusations. Trump used common grocery store goods to symbolize the high cost of food.
Inflation has at its lowest level in over three years, yet food costs are still 21% higher than they were in that time. This week’s report from the Labor Department revealed that the majority of July’s inflation was caused by rising rental prices and other housing costs, a trend that is shown to be moderating based on real-time data. Consequently, we should expect a cooling of house price increases in the months ahead, which should help bring inflation down.
According to Harris’s supermarket pricing proposal, the FTC should punish “big corporations” who engage in price spikes, and he specifically names the meat-packing industry’s lack of competition as the reason behind the exorbitant price of meat.
According to polls, Trump has the support of more Americans than Harris does when it comes to economic matters: When asked who would be better suited to manage the economy, 45% said Trump and 38% said Harris. The most recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that approximately 10% of voters do not have faith in either Harris or Trump to do a better job of managing the economy.
In recent weeks, Harris has increased the number of races considered competitive by strategists by launching a battleground state blitz, riding on a surge of enthusiasm that has occurred since the Democrats’ campaign revival. Democrats are treading carefully on the wave of newfound enthusiasm in North Carolina, a state with a thriving economy but hasn’t seen a Democratic presidential nominee win since Barack Obama in 2008.
Many of Biden and Harris’s stops this year have been in North Carolina. In an effort to reawaken Democratic voters in the wake of Biden’s dismal performance in the June debate against Trump, the former vice president staged his first rally in Raleigh. In the weeks preceding Biden’s decision to withdraw from the campaign, Harris also visited Greensboro and Fayetteville in North Carolina.
“Regarding North Carolina, we went from a situation where Joe Biden was almost surely going down in defeat here whereas Kamala Harris has a very real chance of winning,” said Steven Greene, a political science professor from North Carolina State University.
For Harris’s campaign, North Carolina “is as likely as any of those states to be the tipping point state, so we’ve invested in it heavily since the beginning,” according to Dan Kanninen, battleground states director.
Harris is attempting to find a middle ground between claiming credit for the achievements of the Biden administration and establishing her own reputation and economic program.
On Thursday, someone asked Biden if he thought Harris would put some distance between herself and his economic record. “She won’t,” he declared.
Together with Harris, he made his first public appearance in Maryland since Biden’s withdrawal on Thursday, when they highlighted their successful efforts to reduce the pricing of ten prescription medications for Medicare beneficiaries. The change was made possible by a clause in the massive Inflation Reduction Act, which mostly dealt with issues related to healthcare and environmental protection.
To make health care more accessible, Harris lauded Biden and stated that “few leaders in our nation have done more” during the ceremony. The president said that Trump is “fighting to get rid of what we just passed” and criticized big pharmaceutical firms.
In arguing for his economic legacy, Biden repeated several of Harris’s proposed measures.
“I support companies’ ability to make a profit, but I will not tolerate price gouging,” Biden stated. “I am grateful that in my final three months as president, I have finally accomplished what I set out to do when I was a young senator,” the president said.
