Kamala Harris Proposes Expansive Housing Subsidies, ‘Price-Gouging’ Regulations in First Economic Plan

Vice President Kamala Harris laid out more than a dozen policy proposals on Friday aimed at lowering costs for middle-class Americans and supporting young families, marking her first attempt at setting an economic agenda since becoming the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee.

Harris’s campaign unveiled the policy proposals ahead of a speech in North Carolina on Friday afternoon, where she is expected to tout her economic agenda and contrast it with her 2024 GOP rival, former president Donald Trump.

The move comes as Republicans have criticized Harris’s campaign for its lack of concrete policy proposals, besides her abandonment of several progressive policies she supported during her 2019 run for the presidency.

The proposals Harris is pitching are intended to lower costs of housing, prescription drugs, and groceries, while giving tax relief to new families, forgiving medical debt, and promoting the construction of new homes. Many of her plans resemble the Biden administration’s actions and President Joe Biden’s agenda throughout his term.

Harris’s campaign did not release a price tag for the policy proposals.

For young families, Harris is proposing a combination of tax benefits and policies to push companies to build more housing. Harris is proposing a $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns, a plan similar to the one that Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance or Ohio, proposed over the weekend.

The $6,000 tax credit would be separate from Harris’s promise to restore the $3,600 expanded child tax credit that lapsed after being part of Biden’s coronavirus pandemic stimulus package three years ago. Other tax cuts Harris is proposing are an expanded earned income tax credit for frontline workers and a tax cut for Americans buying insurance on the Obamacare marketplace.

She is floating a plan to cut  regulations and enact tax incentives for building starter homes. She aims to oversee the construction of 3 million new housing units over the next four years to tackle the housing shortage that is contributing to skyrocketing home prices, according to the campaign.

Harris is also proposing to provide $25,000 in down payment support to first-time homebuyers, and creating a $40 billion fund to support innovative housing construction. Harris’ home-building agenda is paired with a crackdown on alleged “price-fixing” by rental data firms and the purchasing of homes by large financial firms and wealthy investors.

“Trump likes to talk about being a builder, but when he was President, he simply never got it done,” Harris’s campaign said in the Friday rollout.

Vance responded that Harris’s plan would make the nation’s housing shortage worse. “Kamala Harris wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes. This will only further exacerbate the housing shortage in our country. It’s a disgrace,” Vance said on X. “We should be making it easier and more affordable for American citizens to buy homes.”

On healthcare, Harris is promising to cap insulin prices at $35 and out-of-pocket drug expenses at $2,000 for all Americans. She also wants to accelerate Medicare negotiations with drug companies and crack down on corporations, mainly pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical middlemen, if they are stifling competition and jacking up prices.

One aspect of Harris’s plan consists of banning “price gouging” on food and grocery items, an idea that resembles price controls of years past. Conservatives have strongly criticized the plan and have noted the high-inflation that defined Biden’s economy. Paired with her “price gouging” rule for groceries is a slate of rules meant to prevent corporations from exploiting consumers, and a plan to enable the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to target companies that do not follow the rules.

The campaign says that Harris will make it “clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.”

During a winding press conference on Thursday, Trump blamed Harris for the rising cost of food and said that Americans are worse off economically after her nearly four years as vice president.

“You don’t have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be because you are living through that nightmare right now,” Trump said.

Other top Republicans also criticized Harris’s economic package, particularly on what they said was her attempt to impose price controls. “Government-imposed price controls create scarcity and a vicious cycle of poverty and dependence on government. So naturally, Kamala Harris likes them,” Utah Senator Mike Lee wrote on X.

Florida Senator Rick Scott blamed Harris and Biden for rising consumer costs, and said that her solution to the problem they caused is “big government on steroids—where Washington bureaucrats stick their hands into American businesses and say what they can and can’t sell a product for.”

“VP Harris, a person who has never built a business, doesn’t understand profit and loss, has never met payrolls, and who has never competed in a consumer market, is going to propose federal price controls,” Scott wrote on X on Thursday. “That should terrify every American.”

Before this set of policies, Harris’s only major policy proposal was a plan to eliminate taxes on tips for service workers, an idea Trump adopted months earlier and turned into a major part of his campaign, especially in Nevada.

“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will work with businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, and all stakeholders to drive an economy that creates opportunity and ensures stability and security for everyone. They believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy, and they will build the confidence and certainty that helps businesses innovate and grow,” Harris’s campaign said. “They will also fulfill their commitment to fiscal responsibility, including by asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share — steps that will allow us to make necessary investments in the middle class, while also reducing the deficit and strengthening our fiscal health.”

These new proposals are only part of Harris’s economic plan that she believes will benefit the American middle class, according to the campaign.