If you’ve been following our coverage of the DNC this week, you know I’ve been documenting the difficulties the press faces in gaining access to events in the city where all sorts of corporations are plotting and scheming. Outlook has gotten a glimpse into a handful of these secret meetings, including a panel hosted by the tech trade group Chamber of Progress at Business Forward’s Briefing Center. The Chamber is a central hub for Big Tech’s lobbying and political operations in Washington and represents Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, all of which have been sued by the Biden administration’s antitrust regulators for violations of competition law.
Like other C-suite candidates, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the Chamber of Commerce is hoping to steer Vice President Harris in a new, more business-friendly direction. Some early signs suggested that Harris, instead of Biden, could provide an opportunity for big tech companies at the top of the ticket. Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West, who remains a close adviser to her campaign and spoke at the convention on Wednesday night, is chief adviser to Uber, which the Chamber of Progress has been a client of for a time.
But the unveiling of Harris’s economic program last week suggested that her administration is not quite ready to roll back the Biden-era approach to corporate power. Her program includes expanding the federal government’s powers to crack down on food price gouging and stronger antitrust enforcement, among a handful of other populist measures. Noticeably absent from the policy, however, was the technology sector.
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The Chamber of Progress has clearly taken note of Harris’ stance on corporate malpractice and is trying to push back against it. The panel, which also included partner Adam Kovacevich, was co-hosted by the New Democrats, a moderate centrist coalition in the House.
The discussion mainly revolved around discussion points from a strategy paper that was distributed at the event and signed by the Outlooktitled “Democratic Cost of Living Agenda.” It essentially lays out how the lobbying group wants Democrats to cut costs in the economy, a nearly universal goal across the political spectrum. But the specific strategy Democrats are supposed to use to achieve this is at odds with the Harris campaign’s recent policy goals.
For example, the introductory section of the Chamber of Commerce’s handbook contains bullet points that downplay the role of concentrated market power in driving up prices during inflation. This view is the real motivation behind Harris’ proposal to ban price gouging. “Corporate greed is a small factor,” the document says. “Subsidizing demand drives prices even higher.”
Another area where the Chamber is positioned significantly to the right of most mainstream Democrats is taxes, which will be the main political point of contention in Congress next year when the Trump tax cuts expire. “Avoid tax increases with zero- or low-cost solutions,” the Chamber’s “Key Principles” section states. That may be convenient for the Chamber’s clients, but it is not consistent with the Harris campaign’s stated goals. Just this week, her campaign team said it would support the Biden White House proposal this spring to raise taxes by $5 trillion on wealthy Americans earning over $400,000 a year and on large corporations.
Overall, the document has several main concerns. One of them is to make housing more affordable by changing local zoning laws that hinder housing construction and development. This is in line with an emerging consensus among Democrats. Harris has proposed both loosening restrictions on developers and providing relief to first-time home buyers, with subsidies capped at $25,000.
Housing policy is at the heart of a particular worldview espoused by the Chamber of Commerce, in that there is a coherent philosophy that goes beyond a corporate wish list. The document reflects a draft the Chamber released this spring called “The Abundance and Affordability Project.” These policy recommendations promote a supply-side approach that assumes that regulatory restrictions on businesses are to blame for the affordability problems that frustrate most Americans. Reducing red tape will lower costs, the Chamber argues, while demand-side subsidies, often advocated by progressives, will only exacerbate the problems.
This view largely ignores the market power of monopolies that limit manufacturing capacity to drive up prices. In some cases, however, the Chamber recognizes that competition is necessary. In fact, to reduce the exorbitantly high cost of healthcare for Americans, the Chamber in this document advocates for “increased funding for antitrust enforcement in hospital systems.” It remains to be seen whether the Chamber will actually use its lobbying power to increase funding for the very enforcement agencies at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice that are going after their own tech customers.
In its competition section, the chamber blames protective tariffs for rising consumer costs. Tariffs are one of the industrial policies the Biden administration favors across various sectors of the economy to expand the country’s manufacturing base. Harris has not yet laid out a full plan on tariffs, although she has criticized Trump’s proposed across-the-board tariff increases. (At the DNC, Biden’s U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Harris is a “fighter” on trade issues who is expected to continue the worker-centered agenda.)
Trade is just one of the inherent tensions between the surplus agenda and the interests of trade unions, which often favor some protection of domestic production.
One way to address the financial crisis identified by the Chamber is to focus on raising wages through higher minimum wages and more unions. But when it comes to education, the Chamber decides to only consider “small relaxations in child-teacher ratios.” Wage increases to attract talent are not mentioned at all. In general, the Chamber’s preferred tactic is to remove supply-side constraints on the labor market, for example by drastically cutting “occupational licensing standards” for various professions, from doctors to pilots.
But some of these proposals are simply advocacy for the Chamber’s clients. There is a section on embracing innovative technologies that urges Democrats to “encourage vehicle innovation by creating neutral rules for human-driven and autonomous vehicles.” Technology companies like Google and Apple are leading the way in autonomous vehicle experiments.
The chamber’s influence is a prime example of the DNC’s inside game of trying to pull party leaders onto the side of the political interests favored by their clients.
