Instead of using the opportunity to outline her plans for an economy that many believe is not working well for her voters, Vice President Kamala Harris “squandered” her Friday speech in North Carolina “on populist gimmicks,” Washington Post’s editorial board said in a recent opinion piece.
The editorial highlights that Americans are still feeling the pinch of high costs for essentials like groceries, housing, and even fast food.
While inflation has significantly cooled since its peak in 2022—a point the Biden-Harris administration could claim as an accomplishment—prices remain high compared to the Trump era, making it a politically sensitive issue for Harris.
The board suggests that Harris could have taken a more straightforward approach by explaining to voters that the inflation surge in 2021 was primarily due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the administration supported, are effectively slowing it down.
Instead, the vice president opted to place the blame on big businesses.
“She vowed to go after ‘price gouging’ by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined ‘federal ban on price gouging.’,” Washington Post’s opinion piece states.
The editorial board points out that many stores are already cutting prices in response to renewed consumer interest in bargains. Moreover, Harris’s plan to target companies with "excessive" profits has been met with skepticism, drawing comparisons to President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s.
“Whether the Harris proposal wins over voters remains to be seen, but if sound economic analysis still matters, it won’t,” the article continues.
The Washington Post acknowledges that Harris’s housing plan has a somewhat stronger foundation.
She calls for the construction of 3 million new homes over the next four years, correctly identifying the lack of supply as the core issue in housing affordability. Her proposal includes smart tax incentives to encourage this construction.
However, the editorial board highlights that her plan to offer $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers could exacerbate the problem by increasing demand and thereby driving prices up further.
This measure would be more sensible if Harris proposed offsetting it by “eliminating other demand-side housing subsidies, such as the mortgage interest deduction, a roughly $30 billion annual drain on federal revenue that benefits many wealthy Americans — but she does not,” the piece writes.
Harris’s proposal to increase the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 per child for middle- and low-income families is seen by the editorial board as her strongest policy position.
The board notes that this level of support was in place in 2021 and helped lift many families above the poverty line. If designed with proper work incentives, the child tax credit could be an effective anti-poverty measure.
Harris also proposed expanding the earned income tax credit for childless low-income workers, a move the board praises for its bipartisan support in Congress. Moreover, she plans to extend tax breaks beyond 2025 to help lower-income Americans afford health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
“Those tax breaks are part of the reason more than 92 percent of Americans have health insurance now,” The Washington Post notes.
Harris also aims to expand the government's power to negotiate Medicare drug prices and to permanently cap out-of-pocket drug spending at $2,000 per year for everyone. While these ideas have merit, the board notes that they come with significant costs.
Despite Harris’s commitment to not raising taxes on households earning less than $400,000 annually—a pledge she reiterated in her speech—the board voices concern over the lack of specific revenue offsets in her economic plan. Without these, Harris's full plan could add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
“To be sure, every campaign makes expensive promises that will never come to pass, especially with a divided Congress,” the article states.
“Remember Mr. Biden’s pledge to make community college free? Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment,” it concluded.