The Few Policy Details Harris Has Revealed Have Economists Scratching Their Heads

Kamala Harris hasn’t said much about the economic policies she plans to implement if she wins in November — and what she has said has left economists, even those who have worked with past Democratic administrations, scratching their heads.

The main criticism people generally have of presidential campaigns is that they’re “overly ambitious,” says Joshua Hendrickson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Mississippi. “They have a huge policy agenda, and you look at it and go, ‘Okay, you can’t possibly do all of these things. You can’t do a fraction of these things.’” Not so with Democrats’ new nominee, who has thus far declined to articulate in detail her vision for the future of the country she hopes to lead.

Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign is “so short on details” and “so short on policy proposals,” Hendrickson says, that it’s “not even clear what their overall vision is.” When she does take a position, she does so haphazardly, “throwing policies at the wall” without any “coherent pattern.”

By this point in the 2008 campaign, Obama had released a 33-page “Blueprint for Change” outlining his plan for America. His campaign website featured policy proposals on 23 different topics, including the economy, education, health care, and homeland security. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign website was chock full of proposals, with nearly 40 policy blurbs explaining her positions on the issues.

There is still no issues or policy section on the Harris-Walz campaign website. Democrats have waved away questions about Harris’s comparatively less detailed policy agenda, telling National Review in Chicago during last week’s Democratic convention that she’s had a rushed timeline and will get more specific as the race goes on. The risk-averse strategy relies on vague pledges to protect abortion rights, preserve entitlements, prevent gun violence, and pass the border bill Trump killed earlier this year.

“People should be a little patient,” Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, told National Review last week. “But if you want to know where she stands on some of these issues, look at her record. It’s only been a few weeks, and so she has to play catch up in terms of getting all the position papers up.”

Before the Democratic convention, Harris announced during a campaign stop in Raleigh, N.C., a suite of populist economic-policy proposals that she insists will build an “opportunity economy” for all Americans. That list of policy proposals includes a “first-ever” plan to end alleged corporate “price gouging” of groceries, forgive medical debt for millions of Americans, instate price caps for prescription drugs, build 3 million new housing units, and offer a $25,000 credit to first-time homebuyers.

Her team announced Wednesday morning that the vice president and some campaign surrogates will spend this week traveling to battleground states to tell voters about her plans to lower housing prices and “end the housing shortage.”

Economists are skeptical. “I don’t really understand how the federal government is going to do that, because the impediment to building houses is really coming from large cities in the United States who have zoning rules, and those are all local rules,” says Hendrickson, the University of Mississippi economist.

If legislated, Harris’s proposed $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers “will increase the demand for homes by starter families and young people, and a few will benefit,” says Gary Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But probably for the most part, it will just raise the price of starter homes.”

Harris’s vague anti-“price gouging” shtick has also unleashed a wave of criticism from economists, who say that the proposal misidentifies the underlying causes of inflation and papers over the reality that the profit margin for grocery stores remains in the single digits. “This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” Harvard economist Jason Furman, who previously worked in the Obama administration, told the New York Times earlier this month.

Harris has also taken flak from the right for cribbing some ideas from the GOP ticket. She took a page out of Trump’s playbook in pledging to eliminate taxes on tips — an idea the GOP nominee announced earlier this summer and that has earned both campaigns criticism from Betsey Stevenson, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration. “If any of my economics students had proposed this idea, they would have received a failing grade,” Stevenson wrote in an op-ed for Bloomberg.

And after the GOP’s VP nominee J. D. Vance announced his support for expanding the child tax credit to $5,000 per child, Harris expressed support for a $3,600 child tax credit and a $6,000 child tax credit during the first year of an infant’s life.

As the Harris campaign presumably wades its way toward releasing more specific policy proposals, its advisers seem to be using the press to pitch and poll-test ideas. Harris campaign adviser Brian Deese, a former economic adviser to both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, recently discussed the idea of a “clean energy Marshall plan” during an interview with Semafor and in an August 20 op-ed in Foreign Affairs. While he says Harris has not endorsed the idea, he is suggesting the U.S. could move toward offering U.S. loans for clean-energy buyers in developing countries to purchase U.S.-made hardware, as a way to better compete against China’s clean-energy dominance. 

Ahead of her first presidential debate with Trump on September 10, Harris is expected to answer questions about her economic policy platform during a joint sit-down interview this week alongside her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris’s first such interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, will air Thursday at 9 p.m. ET.

While she’s avoided specifics, Harris’s time in the Biden administration and the positions she took during the Democratic primary in 2019 make clear she’s going to pull the country further left, whatever form that ends up taking.

“It is safe to say Harris is running on the most left-wing economic platform of any major party presidential nominee since at least 1972,” says Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He pointed to her support for Biden’s existing plan to jack up taxes on some high-income households, wealthy investors, and company founders for an increase of $5 trillion in taxes over the next decade, while cutting other taxes by more than $4 trillion. Harris, whose campaign says she supports Biden’s vow not to raise taxes on households making less than $400,000, is “standing on the shoulders of Bidenomics and moving leftward by adding in price controls,” Riedl said.

“And surely,” he tells National Review, “we’re going to see more spending proposals over the next couple months as well.”

Around NR

• Philip Klein looks back at how Kamala Harris’s first presidential bid failed back in 2019 thanks to her “incoherent” health-care position:

While there were other factors leading to her collapse in the polls, the health-care issue dominated conversation during her brief time as a top-tier candidate. In her current campaign, aides claim (without any public explanation from Harris) that she no longer supports Medicare for All, a socialized health-insurance system, despite once claiming she was a strong supporter. Given Harris’s reluctant approach to interviews in the current campaign . . . it’s clear avoiding the 2019 fiasco is no doubt at the front of their minds.

• The Editors podcast weighs whether an endorsement from RFK Jr. helps or hurts Trump:

Jim says that, “with Kennedy off the ballot, . . . it really is head to head Harris versus Trump, and there shouldn’t be any third-party figure taking away a significant chunk . . . from either one of these two major candidates.”

• Republicans need to take a stand on abortion, NR’s editors write in a new editorial:

It’s one thing for a Republican candidate for national office to say that a federal law against abortion is unattainable, or even undesirable. The first point is accurate at least in the short run, and some sincere pro-lifers believe the second on constitutional or prudential grounds. But the palpable panic among Republicans has reached the point that pro-lifers have to wonder if there’s any difference left between the parties on abortion.

• While J. D. Vance has ably articulated Trump’s views on a slew of issues, Tim Walz cannot do the same for Harris because Harris does not even know her own mind, writes Michael Brendan Dougherty: 

She allowed the convention nominating her to proceed in the most substanceless way possible, avowing only to be “joyful.” Harris did not have convictions that could withstand the passing fashions and fads of 2020’s radicalism, and her attempt to reassert any have been awkward.

• Dan McLaughlin outlines seven potential reasons why the media is so in the tank for Harris, ranging from “simple partisanship” to “respect for the game.” Dan sets out to answer these questions:

Why are they doing it? Why is the national political press all-in for Kamala Harris, to the point where outlets such as Politico and Axios are de facto spokespersons for the Harris campaign? Sure, we’ve seen media bias before, but the past month has taken things to new levels.

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