At a campaign speech Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris promised to “make it a top priority to bring down costs” if elected president and touted her new plans to tackle food and housing costs, slash prescription drug prices and expand the child tax credit.
Harris said the Biden administration has made progress, given the Covid economy it inherited from former President Donald Trump, but that it isn’t enough as “many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives.”
“Costs are still too high. And on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” she told the crowd. “As president, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans, like the cost of food. We all know that prices went up during the pandemic, when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high.”
The Harris campaign outlined her proposals prior to the speech. She said she’d work with Congress to impose a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries,” setting rules “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers” to boost their profits. She would also seek new powers for the Federal Trade Commission and state prosecutors to slap “strict new penalties on companies that break the rules,” her campaign said.
The Trump campaign excoriated the idea as a “communist” policy, labeling the vice president “Comrade Kamala.”
“It’s hard to overstate how disastrous of an idea it is to let D.C. bureaucrats dictate the price of groceries in cities, suburbs, and rural communities across the country — dismantling necessary supply-and-demand signals of the free market and ultimately leading to higher prices for consumers,” the campaign’s rapid response team said in an unsigned statement.
Harris noted in her Raleigh remarks: “Look, I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right, and we need to take action when that is the case.”
She touted her plans to create a tax break for homebuilders who construct starter homes for first-time buyers and said she will provide a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homeowners buying a house. She vowed to cut “needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape” as part of that and said she’ll promote “innovative technologies while protecting consumers.” She vowed to set “a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road.”
The vice president pitched her plan to expand the child tax credit and offer “$6,000 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child’s life.” She said she’ll seek to extend Medicare’s $35-per-month insulin out-of-pocket cap to everyone and expand the administration’s Medicare drug price negotiation program.
Both of those policies have faced opposition from Republicans in Congress. Senate Republicans killed a provision to cap insulin costs on the private market in 2022, and earlier this month they blocked a much smaller child tax credit bill than Harris is proposing.
Harris also took aim at Trump’s proposal to impose across-the-board tariffs on imported products.
“He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries that will devastate Americans,” she said. “It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs. A Trump tax on gas. A Trump tax on food. A Trump tax on clothing. A Trump tax on over-the-counter medication.” (Trump has staunchly defended his tariffs as a way to confront foreign countries.)
She also attacked the GOP nominee’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, drawing chants of, “We’re not going back!” — a staple of her rally speeches, which she has embraced as a new campaign theme against the former president seeking a comeback.
And she tied Trump to the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint while criticizing his plans to extend the Trump tax cuts for upper earners.
“He plans to give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year, and he plans to cut corporate taxes by over a trillion dollars, even as they pull in record profits,” Harris said.
Harris, meanwhile, has adopted President Joe Biden’s promise not to raise taxes for Americans with incomes under $400,000, signaling that she’d extend at least some of the Trump tax cuts for lower earners when they expire at the end of 2025.
Harris added that “in the weeks to come, I will address in greater detail my plans to build an opportunity economy.”
She said the choice in the 2024 election is between “two very different visions for our nation.”
“Ours focused on the future, and the other focused on the past,” she said.
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