As Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s new economic proposals dominated Sunday morning\u2019s political shows, allies touted her ideas to address food and housing costs as beneficial to middle-class Americans, while critics \u2014 including Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee \u2014 slammed her plan as unworkable and unrealistic.<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019s economic plan, which she laid out in a speech Friday, includes a ban on price gouging for groceries and food, the cancellation of medical debt, a cap on prescription drug costs, a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby\u2019s life. The proposals have been cheered by supporters like billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, but some have also drawn criticism, including from economists, for potential hikes in federal spending.<\/p>\n
Democrats on Sunday defended Harris\u2019s economic proposals as targeting many Americans\u2019 key needs, and they noted that her speech \u2014 delivered roughly three weeks into her sudden presidential campaign \u2014 represented the start of her policy pitch, with more detail to come.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people are reading too much into what has been put out there,\u201d Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a co-chair of the Harris campaign, said on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d dismissing attacks on Harris\u2019s proposal. \u201cThe biggest part of our personal budgets go toward housing, go toward health care, go toward the fundamentals, and she\u2019s got a plan on all those fronts to help more Americans be able to get a path to prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking on CNN\u2019s \u201cState of the Union,\u201d House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not explicitly endorse Harris\u2019s new policies but said his caucus was ready to work with her to \u201cdrive costs down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeffries also defended Harris\u2019s focus on price gouging, which even some left-leaning experts have criticized as a distraction from the major causes of inflation.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the challenge that many everyday Americans have felt is that price gouging is occurring by some bad actors,\u201d Jeffries said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s reasonable for us to look into how we can stop it from occurring. Vice President Kamala Harris is simply saying we have to make sure that markets are properly functioning.\u201d<\/p>\n
While GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has attempted to frame Harris\u2019s plan to combat price-gouging as Soviet-style price controls \u2014 an argument that some of his allies repeated Sunday \u2014 Democrats rejected the comparison and offered their own explanations. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), speaking on CNN\u2019s \u201cState of the Union,\u201d said that her proposals aligned with existing state laws.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve heard corporations talk about how they raised prices even above what the inflationary amount would be. And you saw that their profits went up significantly during that time period,\u201d Pritzker said. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s not unreasonable for her to say that the federal government should do what many states have already done, which is focus on that price gouging.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also credited Harris\u2019s proposal to offer a $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers as showing she\u2019s attuned to the needs of middle- and working-class Americans. \u201cIt is impossible in this country right now, with interest rates as high as they are, for people to buy a house,\u201d Pritzker said.<\/p>\n
Republicans, meanwhile, focused on Harris\u2019s past stances and sought to link her to President Joe Biden\u2019s economic policies. Voters have persistently said that they have low confidence in Biden\u2019s handling of the economy, and polls still give the edge to Trump over Harris on economic issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most absurd thing that Kamala says at her rallies is, \u2018On day one, I\u2019m going to tackle the food and housing affordability crisis in this country,\u2019\u201d Vance said on \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d criticizing his rival\u2019s record. \u201cDay one for Kamala Harris was 3\u00bd years ago, and everything that she\u2019s done has made the affordability problem worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), speaking on \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d called Harris \u201cthe most liberal person\u201d ever nominated to be president, pointing to her previous support for a ban on fracking, the elimination of private health insurance and other liberal positions she adopted ahead of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Harris has sought to distance herself from those past stances.<\/p>\n
\u201cA nightmare for Harris is to defend her policy choices. Every day we\u2019re not talking about her policy choices as vice president and what she would do as president \u2026 is a good day for her and a bad day for us,\u201d Graham said, delivering a warning to Trump to avoid personal attacks on Harris, an ongoing frustration for Trump\u2019s campaign advisers. \u201cIf you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.\u201d<\/p>\n
For their part, Democrats sought to shift discussion of Harris\u2019s proposals to topics such as health care, where they hold a notable advantage in polls.<\/p>\n
Appearing on \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), another co-chair of the Harris campaign, touted last week\u2019s White House announcement of prescription-drug savings, calling it \u201cone of the most important pieces\u201d of Harris\u2019s economic policy rollout and crediting her with casting the deciding vote on the legislation that empowered Medicare to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs. The White House has said that Medicare beneficiaries can expect to save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs when the new prices take effect in 2026.<\/p>\n
Asked on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation\u201d what Democrats could do to stop losing support in rural areas, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) touted Harris\u2019s economic plan as addressing Americans\u2019 daily concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt goes right to the heart of how you support your family,\u201d Beshear said, citing her tax-relief proposals. \u201cIt goes to affording health care and capping overall pharmaceutical costs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, meanwhile, last week signaled support for expanding tariffs, another topic of Sunday\u2019s shows. Many economic experts note that such moves create more inflation and add costs for American consumers.<\/p>\n
\u201cA tariff is paid by consumers. It\u2019s the equivalent of a new Trump tax,\u201d Coons argued.<\/p>\n
Graham countered on \u201cMeet the Press\u201d: \u201cI support his idea that whatever a country does to us on tariffs, we\u2019re going to do to you.\u201d He offered a hypothetical: \u201cIf you make a car in Europe, and we put a 10 percent tariff on it, and we make a car in America and sell it to Europe, and they put a 30 percent tariff on our cars, we\u2019re going to 30 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s new economic proposals dominated Sunday morning\u2019s political shows, allies touted her ideas to address food and housing costs as beneficial to middle-class Americans, while critics \u2014 including Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice-presidential nominee \u2014 slammed her plan as unworkable and unrealistic. Harris\u2019s economic plan, which she laid out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}