Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to board Air Force Two, September 25, 2024, in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, after speaking about the economy in Pittsburgh.
My colleague David Dayen has provided us with a deep and thorough unpacking of Kamala Harris’s economic platform, which she unveiled yesterday in a speech in Pittsburgh, in a fact sheet, and in an 82-page booklet. The paradox here is that the progressive populist red meat, as David noted, was much more apparent in the fact sheet and booklet than in the speech itself.
Those progressive particulars include such “worker-centered industrial policies,” as David termed them, as extending tax credits not just to domestic manufacturing but to manufacturing in Rust Belt factory towns and to manufacturing companies that actually empower workers. Her proposed tax credits would be “linked to the treatment of workers, ensuring the right to organize, and supporting investments in longstanding manufacturing, energy, and agricultural communities.” With the future of U.S. Steel’s aging factories in the Mon Valley (like the future of aging factories everywhere) very much in question, the Harris booklet states that her proposed tax credits
will provide significant additional benefits to investments made in longstanding manufacturing, farming, and energy communities, especially to those who commit to retool or rebuild an existing facility. These new tax credits will also reward companies that engage with industry, workers, unions, and communities to protect jobs, including in light of increasing automation, as well as companies that develop plans to hire existing workers at comparable wages. There will be a special focus on rewarding reinvestment, retooling, and rehiring in longstanding steel and iron communities like those in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley.
The linkage of support for industrial revitalization to support for workers’ right to join a union would be groundbreaking. A less explicit form of that linkage was initially part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, but it didn’t pass muster with Joe Manchin. Should Harris not only win but be blessed with a Democratic Congress, minus Manchin (and Kyrsten Sinema), she could well be able to enact such tax credit criteria in a reconciliation bill. (As long as we’re talking pro-worker tax policy, there’s always my personal hobbyhorse, linking corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay: the higher the ratio, the higher the tax.)
Combine Harris’s industrial policies with her commitment to provide tax credits to build new and affordable housing, and her commitment to fund expansions of apprenticeship and retraining programs, and she has what I’ve previously characterized as something of a “guy” policy to complement her family policies—a larger Child Tax Credit, an affordable child care program, and paid family leave—that probably have greater appeal among women than men (single young men particularly).
As David noted, Harris’s speech was devoted at least as much to affirming her pro-business and capitalist cred as it was to her seriously pro-worker proposals. Given the degree to which she’s still undefined to millions of prospective voters, and given the Trump campaign’s efforts to define her as a committed commie and malevolent Marxist, such affirmations of economic normality are understandably in order.
But her messaging on the stump, on the airwaves, and in social media would do well to stress the more explicitly pro-worker planks of her platform. If she’s to carry the blue-wall trio, the place-based investment and the preference for decent-paying jobs with benefits should resound as loudly as her Child Tax Credit. And if she’s elected and able to enact the key elements of her platform, she’ll be remembered not primarily for being a capitalist, since there’s nothing remarkable in that: Every president in our history has been a capitalist. She’ll be remembered for enacting the kinds of social democratic reforms to capitalism that create a more vibrant and egalitarian America.
