Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday outlined the economic policies she will implement in her first 100 days in office – and they will largely be based on handouts.
She advocates providing free cash to first-time home buyers and low- and middle-income families with children. She is also pursuing a controversial plan to fix food prices.
The revelation is her first major policy announcement since she replaced President Biden as the 81-year-old incumbent as the Democratic nominee, and the White House has said there is no “imbalance” between his policies and hers.
But some of Harris’ actions would be the first of their kind – including setting federal food price caps, which the Trump team quickly dubbed the communist “Maduro plan.”
In many cases, their economic policies also include tax breaks and generous financial assistance of $25,000 for first-time home buyers.
Reducing food costs by banning “price gouging”
Harris’ plan to reduce food costs includes working with Congress to stop price gouging and prevent sellers from overpricing their products.
It would be the first time in US history that there would be a nationwide ban on price gouging.
In her campaign manifesto, she also vowed to set “clear rules of the game” to prevent large corporations from taking advantage of consumers. She would also “give the FTC and state attorneys general new powers to investigate and impose tough new penalties on companies that violate the rules.” She also instructed her administration to take action against oligopolies in the grocery trade.
When choosing their candidate in November, voters consistently rank the economy as their top priority, and Donald Trump’s campaign team has stressed that Harris could have fought against high prices during her tenure as vice president.
Trump’s campaign team accused her of pursuing policies that were more in line with the “Third World” than with America.
Harris “will today expose a government price-fixing system that is more reminiscent of a Third World regime than the United States,” said a statement from Trump’s campaign team. Socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “would be proud of Comrade Kamala.”
Affordable housing
Harris promised to work to build three million new homes to “end the housing shortage” within four years.
To achieve this, she announced in her election campaign that she would offer tax breaks for the first time for the construction of owner-occupied homes, grant tax breaks to companies that build affordable rental housing and “reduce bureaucracy and unnecessary hurdles”.
She also proposed for the first time an average down payment of $25,000 for first-time home buyers, with a particular focus on first-generation homeowners.
She also promised to create a new federal fund to boost housing. The massive $40 billion innovation fund would be twice the size of the current Biden-Harris innovation fund, which also incentivizes local governments to find housing solutions.
The Harris Fund will also “go further and support innovative methods of construction financing and enable developers and homebuilders to design and build affordable rental and housing solutions – on one condition: they must demonstrate that they deliver results,” her campaign said.
Incentives for raising children
Harris’ campaign is advocating for an expansion of the child tax credit to provide middle- and low-income families with tax breaks of up to $6,000 when they have children in their first year.
The campaign also said Harris would fight to restore Biden’s American Rescue Plan’s expanded child tax credit, which amounts to up to $3,600 per child.
For those without children, Harris’ campaign announced she would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to cover lower-income individuals and couples who are not raising a child at home, giving them a tax break of up to $1,500.”
Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has also floated the idea of a child tax credit of up to $5,000 for all American families, not just middle- and low-income families.
Reducing the cost of prescription drugs
Harris vowed to work with her vice president nominee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, to ask states to “cancel medical debt for millions of Americans and help them avoid such debt in the future.”
She also wants to cap insulin costs at $35 and prescription drug copayments at $2,000 for everyone, not just seniors. She also wants to “accelerate the pace of Medicare prescription drug negotiations.”
Harris is expected to make remarks about her policies in North Carolina on Friday afternoon.
