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Harris and Walz should run on ensuring economic freedom by reversing and remedying the brutal imbalance between the people and the powerful.
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.
"You're on your own. You ain't getting shit from us. Call grandma," one Democratic congressman translated.
In his latest comments on parenthood and young families, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance on Wednesday weighed in on how to best help parents who struggle to pay for childcare—but instead of offering a policy solution, the U.S. senator from Ohio punted the obligation to grandparents and other extended family members across the country.
At an event hosted by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point Action in Mesa, Arizona, Vance replied to a question about lowering childcare costs by saying he wants to "make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want."
But Vance appeared to base his answer on the assumption that what families want—and what they haven't already considered on their own—is childcare help from their family members.
"One of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is make it so that—maybe, like, grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more, or maybe there's an aunt or uncle who wants to help out a little more," said Vance. "If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we're spending at daycare."
In other words, said U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.): "You're on your own. You ain't getting shit from us. Call grandma."
The comments came weeks after a 2020 podcast interview with Vance resurfaced, in which he agreed that "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" is to take care of grandchildren.
Vance didn't address what steps might be taken to allow more grandparents to provide childcare for their families—or how the idea might conflict with other Republican policy proposals, such as raising the retirement age or cutting Social Security benefits.
"Maybe Grandma and Grandma still work," said author Jacie Floyd on the social media platform X. "Maybe Grandma and Grandpa have health issues. Maybe Grandma and Grandpa live 1,000 miles away. Maybe Grandma and Grandpa don't want to. The [Republican Party] shouldn’t be planning Grandma and Grandpa's retirement for them."
A Pew Research poll found last year that 19% of Americans aged 65 or older were still working, almost a twofold increase over the late 1980s, and other surveys have shown that nearly 43% of people between 55 and 64 don't have retirement savings accounts—likely making them unable to spend much time providing childcare for working families.
According to Illumine, an app used by parents and childcare providers, a 2022 survey found that 72% of U.S. parents were paying at least 10% of their income on childcare, and 51% were paying more than 20%. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines "affordable" care as costing no more than 7% of a household's income.
At the event in Mesa, enlisting the help of grandparents wasn't Vance's only proposal for the vast majority of parents who are spending too much for daycare. He also suggested lowering the hiring standards for childcare workers, ostensibly enabling providers to pay them less and charge families less for their early childhood services.
"We've got a lot of people who love kids, who would love to take care of kids, but they can't, either because they don't have access to the education they need," said Vance, "or maybe more importantly, because the state government says you need to have some ridiculous certification that has nothing to do with taking care of kids. So, empower people to get the skills they need, don't force every early childcare specialist to go and get a six-year college degree where they've got a whole lot of debt and Americans are much poorer because they're paying out the wazoo for daycare."
Vance didn't elaborate on the "ridiculous certification" that childcare workers should be able to forgo. Requirements for employees in the industry vary from state to state and can include training in CPR and first aid, food handling, and recognizing and reporting child abuse and neglect. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a high school diploma or equivalent is the typical educational requirement for entry-level childcare workers, and the median pay in the industry was just $30,370 per year or $14.60 per hour as of 2023.
"Vance basically spends two minutes saying, 'SUCK IT UP, POORS!" saidUSA Today columnist Rex Huppke. "Daycare costs too much cause you demand 'qualified' providers who aren't 'total randos' with 'no childcare experience.'"
The reality on the ground in states like Michigan shows a very different picture than Vance's suggestion that childcare centers are paying workers too much to make their services affordable for families.
With 85% of childcare funding coming from the federal government instead of the state in Michigan, Kimberly Esper of Little Hawks Childcare and Learning Center toldMid-Michigan Now on Wednesday that many centers struggle to pay staff fairly while keeping their daycare services running.
"It's a balance that I think every childcare center is struggling with right now," said Esper.
Last month, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, unveiled an economic agenda including an expanded child tax credit. Vance has expressed support for such a policy, but missed a vote on a related bill earlier this year, prompting Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to denounce him as a "phony."
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), who introduced the Child Care for Every Community Act, contrasted Vance's proposals on Wednesday with those of the Democrats.
Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) added that "families deserve leaders who understand the importance of making childcare more accessible and affordable."
Harris wants to invest in the care economy and has signaled support for raising corporate tax rates, while Trump has been largely silent on care investments and signaled support for more tax cuts at the top.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have starkly different views on taxes and how the tax code can support families.
Harris voices strong support for families through investments in the care economy. She’s vowed to advance paid family leave, affordable childcare, care for disabled or aging family members, and healthcare. This could be funded with a better tax code.
These policies would help all of us care for our families and strengthen our communities. Investing public dollars in care could also narrow racial and gender pay gaps by boosting the pay of care workers—who are mostly women, and many of them women of color.
Strengthening care infrastructure would help us all thrive and make the economy stronger. But we need to collect sufficient revenue to support those transformational policies.
The Trump campaign has been largely silent on care investments. But his campaign has signaled support for more tax cuts at the top. Such cuts would increase inequality and reduce the availability of federal funding to strengthen the care economy.
We saw this in the 2017 tax law that former President Trump signed. It cut taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations, including cutting the effective tax rate for our largest corporations from an average 22% to an average 12.8%. It also preserved loopholes that allow some of the wealthiest corporations to avoid taxes on most—if not all—of their profits.
These tax cuts for the ultra wealthy led to huge losses in federal tax revenue and spiked the national debt, making it harder for the government to fund new investments in priorities that are important to families.
If reelected, Trump has said he wants to slash corporate taxes further—even though some billionaires pay a lower share of their income in taxes than nurses and teachers do.
By contrast, the Biden-Harris administration created a minimum corporate tax so the wealthiest corporations could no longer pay nothing, added a modest tax on stock buybacks, and funded the IRS to better collect taxes from corporations. These policies raised revenue for care investments and other priorities.
Going forward, Harris has signaled support for raising corporate tax rates, which are at historic lows, and closing loopholes.
Harris and Trump also have different priorities on taxes for families. As a senator, Harris championed a tax credit of $6,000 for married couples and $3,000 for single people in her Lift the Middle Class Act. This would have delivered 88% of its benefits to earners under $119,000.
Harris might not promote this specific plan going forward, but it suggests she’d aim to direct benefits to moderate earners instead of the wealthiest. More recently, she’s proposed expanding the Child Tax Credit and adding a $6,000 credit for families with newborns.
By contrast, the tax bill that Trump signed delivered more than half its benefits to the top 5% of households—those with incomes over $263,000. (Like Harris, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, has suggested a bigger Child Tax Credit. But Vance has also floated making people without children pay more taxes.)
Taxing the wealthiest and big corporations would support care investments and make our tax code more fair. Strengthening care infrastructure would help us all thrive and make the economy stronger. But we need to collect sufficient revenue to support those transformational policies.
There is strong public support for better care and for fairer taxes. Tax justice advocates should call on both the Harris and Trump campaigns to commit to a fairer tax system—and to use the money it would raise to invest in the childcare, elder care, and healthcare our families need.