A Winning Economic Agenda for Kamala Harris

Today I want to talk with you about what U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris could do to win over more Americans on the issue that remains her biggest challenge: the economy.

Harris’ family-centered policies—$6,000 for newborns, a tax credit that will help people with children decide for themselves whether to work or stay at home, and universal affordable childcare—are useful and important.

But here’s the rub: Many young men and women simply can’t afford to form families in the first place. As Harold Meyerson notes in The American Prospect, Harris’ family policies won’t have much impact on many young working-class men and women employed in the private sector, where the rate of unionization is barely 6%, where gig employment is often a necessity just to get by (as is a second or even third job), and where the absence of job stability or an adequate income or both deters marriage.

Freedom—including reproductive freedom—means the chance to raise a family without soul-crushing economic stress.

The disappearance of good jobs for those without a college degree has led to declining marriage rates across all of the American working class, according to studies by MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues—a far steeper rate of decline than in the middle and upper classes.

The issue boils down to how to get good jobs to people without four-year college degrees.

On Friday, Harris made the important promise to dispense with unnecessary college degree requirements for federal jobs. She could go further and tell private employers to use skills-based hiring instead of requiring college degrees.

Harris might also call for the construction of 10 million new homes over the next four years. This would help funnel non-college workers into building trades and community college apprenticeship programs, leading to high-wage jobs that don’t require college degrees.

She could build on the impetus of the CHIPs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act to get good new jobs to places around the country that have been abandoned by most industry. The most important family policy for young people growing up in rural Georgia or North Carolina is to be able to find good jobs where they are, rather than have to leave their communities to find adequate-paying work.

She should also build on the significant work of Biden’s FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department in attacking monopolies and mergers, and promise that as president she’ll fight for competitive markets where big corporations can’t keep prices high (she’s already said she’ll attack corporate price gouging).

Monopolies don’t just hurt consumers. They also hurt workers, and make it harder for them to have families. When there’s only one game in town, you don’t dare push back against arbitrary schedules and hours that keep you from your family.

Harris should attack housing developers that collude to drive up prices. She should fight against mandatory arbitration, which locks workers and consumers into private courts funded by the same companies they want to challenge. And she should commit to strengthening unions by preventing big corporations from firing workers who want them and pushing for sector-by-sector bargaining.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed exempting overtime earnings from federal tax. But remember: It was Trump whose labor department made about 8 million workers ineligiblefor overtime. Harris should pledge to reverse that ruling.

She should package all of this, as Jedediah Britton-Purdy suggests, as part of a push for economic freedom.

Many Americans feel powerless, ripped off by monopolies in everything from phone service to concert tickets, locked into dead-end jobs because there are no alternatives, unable even to contemplate raising a family because they can’t possibly afford the costs.

Freedom—including reproductive freedom—means the chance to raise a family without soul-crushing economic stress.

I’ve already discussed how Trump’s economic agenda (to the extent he’s provided one) is just another variant on trickle-down economics, where wealth and power go to the top and nothing trickles down. Trump’s version would result in an even more brutal imbalance between the people and the powerful.

But that’s not how many Americans see it. As Purdy says:

Although Democrats see Trump as a chaotic bad boss in chief, many supporters see him as the real defender of economic security, decent jobs, and a safe and orderly world. His call for tariffs on all imported goods and his promise to beat up on companies until they lower prices may be unrealistic, but they are concrete promises to shake up the system on behalf of ordinary people. That’s the kind of dramatic change so many people seem to want.

Fundamentally, economic freedom requires reversing and remedying the brutal imbalance between the people and the powerful. It necessitates taking power back from the ruling economic class—from the ultra-wealthy who have been bribing politicians to lower their taxes, allow them monopolize markets, and crush labor unions.

This must be at the heart of the Harris-Walz economic agenda.