CV NEWS FEED // Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris this week announced several economic policies she would implement if elected to the White House in November.
Harris announced the proposals during a Friday rally in North Carolina, claiming they would help build an “opportunity economy … where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed.”
Harris vowed to bolster the child tax credit, an idea that many critics argued she likely co-opted from the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-OH.
Vance in particular is known as a longtime supporter of expanding the credit to incentivize the growth of large families. Trump and Vance’s support for expanded child tax credits – widely seen as a populist political stance – puts them at odds with some fellow Republicans.
More controversially, Harris stated that she favors price controls – which critics compared to policies enacted in socialist and communist regimes.
She also pushed for down-payment assistance and tax incentives for first-time homebuyers – which critics held is unfair to the millions of pre-existing American homeowners.
Expanding the child tax credit – a familiar policy?
The Hill reported that “Harris’s plan calls for beefing up the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to provide a $6,000 tax cut to families with newborn children.”
“The plan also calls for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to cover those with lower-income jobs who aren’t raising children,” The Hill added.
The Wall Street Journal noted that Harris also “proposed restoring the expanded child tax credit of up to $3,600 a child, which was put in place in 2021 amid the Covid-19 pandemic and expired at the end of that year.”
Critics quickly alleged that Harris “copied” Trump and Vance on this policy.
During a CBS interview just over a week ago, Vance stated: “I’d love to see a child tax credit that’s $5,000 per child.”
“President Trump has been on the record for a long time supporting a bigger child tax credit, and I think you want it to apply to all American families,” Vance added.
Unlike Vance and Trump, neither Harris nor her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has taken part in a full-length traditional interview with a media source since becoming the Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Price controls
One of Harris’ earliest released economic policies is also arguably her most controversial.
On Wednesday, two days before her speech in North Carolina, her campaign announced that it will propose the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging” for food items. Harris reiterated her support for the proposal during her Friday rally.
Many critics denounced the ban as draconian “price controls” that would hurt businesses. Some even went so far as to compare it to the economic policies of multiple far-left authoritarian governments.
During a CNN interview, liberal-leaning columnist Catherine Rampell stated: “First of all, nobody can explain what price gouging means.”
“What does it mean to have an excessive price or an excessive profit margin?” she asked. “That seems to be shorthand for a price or a profit margin that bugs me.”
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before: Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, etc.,” Rampell added. “It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets. Plenty of certainty.”
She indicated that if a specific bill Senate Democrats have proposed to combat so-called “price gouging” is passed and signed into law it “might actually increase prices.”
Trump campaign official Brian Hughes responded to Harris’ price control plan: “Her policies rival some of the most socialist and authoritarian models from world history.” Hughes further called the proposal “something out of Venezuela or Cuba.”
On Thursday, The Washington Post published an op-ed Rampell wrote in response to Hughes’ comments.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” she emphasized in the article. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”
Rampell’s op-ed was titled “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?”
Well-known financial radio show host Dave Ramsey also blasted Harris’ proposed price controls, stating: “It’s not sustainable because it’s artificial.”
“If you just put a lid on something and if you want to explore what really happens, just go back to the 1970s,” Ramsey told FOX News hostess Laura Ingraham:
We tried it. There was a whole movement for price controls across everything, because inflation was out of control and rampant, just like it is now. And so it’s been tried. It does not work.
Aid for ‘first-time homebuyers’
Although Harris’ proposals for expanding the child tax credit and banning “price gouging” seemed to generate the lion’s share of media attention, some still warned that another one of her economic ideas might unleash vast negative consequences.
The Hill reported:
Another plan Harris proposed builds upon a previous proposal from the Biden administration that sought to provide first-generation homebuyers with $25,000 in down-payment assistance, along with a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
Critics blasted the proposal to devote significant taxpayer money to “down-payment assistance” as both hurting pre-existing homeowners and not actually helping many first time home buyers.
“Something tells me this will not help first time home buyers,” one user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote. “It’s going to allow people to buy homes who have no business buying homes.”
A popular X account that covers technology and markets described a potential scenario of how the policy may play out in practice:
Suppose you are bidding on a $100,000 home against 3 other first time home buyers.
Buyer A bids $95,000. Buyer B bids $100,000. Buyer C bids $105,000. Buyer C would get it for $105k.
Now imagine you give everyone $25k.
Buyer C now bids $130k. Prices went up $25k.
