Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Kamala Harris laid out aspects of her economic plan in a speech Wednesday in Pittsburgh.
One of the moments that stood out in Kamala Harris’s big speech at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday was when she offered tax credits to manufacturing firms that protect American jobs. And when she called for increasing investment in public-sector research and development agencies. And when she vowed to stockpile critical minerals key to the energy transition and national security. And when she said she would take on China’s forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft. And when she endorsed Buy America requirements in procurement and contracting. And when she said that investments in manufacturing would be offset by preventing operatic accounting strategies big corporations use to hide money overseas.
Or rather, those moments stood out from the fact sheet the Harris campaign sent around after the speech. None of them actually appeared in the speech itself. But like many a corporate retreat, the deliverables looked a little better than what the CEO had to say.
The audiences are different, of course. The speech was billed as a way to display an animating vision behind the “New Way Forward” headlines the campaign has foregrounded. Because Harris got such a late start campaigning, she doesn’t have the years of consistent messaging native to most presidential candidates. And she is hypersensitive about being tagged as a radical, both to the voting public and to the donor base that has driven up her fundraising.
Trying to both lock in trust and dispel mischaracterizations, to both pitch toward the undecided voter and maintain the hype from the base that accompanied her substitution for Joe Biden in the race, is a real high-wire act. It leads to cockeyed statements like quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s desire for “bold, persistent experimentation” (to get out of the Depression, in his case) with a promise for “practical solutions” and “pragmatic” approaches, which may be virtuous but are less than bold. It leads to boasting of the Biden-Harris record while also rhetorically shedding it. It leads to shaking her head at the largest corporations making “record profits” and demeaning Donald Trump for making the economy only work “for those who own the big skyscrapers, not those who build them,” while also seeking an “active partnership between government and the private sector” to “fully unlock economic opportunity.”
It’s just an awkward fit. One that wouldn’t be so awkward if there wasn’t this need to make up for lost time and overcompensate.
I should say that the last 35 years of presidential politics—a pretty good run for Democrats, nearly all of them wins in the popular vote—have taught us that populist economics sells in campaigning. Bill Clinton said that people who work hard and play by the rules can get ahead; Al Gore took the people vs. the powerful to a comeback win; and Barack Obama, struggling under the weight of a stagnant economy, obliterated Mitt Romney as a corporate ghoul. You see wisps of this in the Harris approach, aligning Trump with the wealthy and foregrounding the needs of the middle class. But it’s so larded up with paeans to innovation and “emerging technologies” like blockchain that it’s hard to take in.
The fact sheet doesn’t have to make such somersaults and splits. It can just string together what the Harris-Walz administration wants to do to reach its goals. The fact sheet can just say that they will build on industrial success in a country where real manufacturing construction investment is at the highest level in American history. It can cite the vice president’s tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn’t have to tap-dance.
And the vision is actually coherent when shorn of the constant hedging and playing to multiple audiences. For starters, the fact sheet revives what has been an absent manufacturing pitch to the Rust Belt by highlighting new “America Forward” investments, an extension of the policies of the Biden administration. Tax credits under this banner would be “linked to the treatment of workers, ensuring the right to organize, and supporting investments in longstanding manufacturing, energy, and agricultural communities.” That surpasses what Biden was able to fully get in some provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and other industrial policies.
Trying to both lock in trust and dispel mischaracterizations is a real high-wire act.
Why some of this money is being thrown into the sinkhole of artificial intelligence, which has as much capital available as any project in human history, is beyond me. Why do AI data centers need a tax break? But the rest, like “green steel” technologies (which just got new market commitments this week) and other efforts to reduce industrial emissions, clean-energy manufacturing, semiconductors, next-generation transportation, and the tools and machines to make all that stuff is perfectly appropriate.
Place-based investments give greater bonuses to facilities located in factory towns and “energy communities.” And there’s one tantalizing line in the fact sheet that actually operationalizes the airy Harris rhetoric about an economy that works for everyone. It says that some investment tax credits will be given to “reward companies that work with unions and communities to support workers and to protect jobs.” Incentives to keep companies in America goes beyond a narrow vision of industrial policy that only seeks to fight for the advanced manufacturing of the future.
Earlier in the week, Donald Trump threatened a 200 percent tariff on John Deere if they followed through on plans to move to Mexico. The problem is that Trump signed an updated free-trade agreement with Mexico that prohibits retaliatory tariffs of that kind, making the threat empty. Trump, who has promised big corporate tax cuts for manufacturing and protectionist across-the-board tariffs, was actually pretty bad on outsourcing while president, since his tax law encouraged it. This is a testament to his inattention and laziness; in 2016, Trump used the bully pulpit to prevent some jobs at Carrier from moving to Mexico, but lost interest as Carrier jobs, along with those at the plant down the street, were eventually outsourced.
Harris correctly identified in the speech that Carrier “offshored hundreds of jobs to Mexico under [Trump’s] watch,” another wisp of populism in a guarded address. But the line in the fact sheet goes further, offering a carrot to companies to keep production here, rather than a pretend stick. Combine that with Harris’s stated goal to double apprenticeships over the first term, offering skills and retraining to move into new manufacturing positions (as well as teaching and health care), and she can actually go to John Deere shift workers and say there’s a real plan for their future, instead of hot air.
That aligns with her desire to “emphasiz[e] skills, not just [college] degrees.” Trump already removed degree requirements for most federal jobs, so I don’t really know what her promise on that front signifies, but the Harris plan builds on skills development with federal investments in public schools and public research and development, so knowledge is not privatized and hoarded for the benefit of industry.
Cutting red tape and reforming permitting got a few shout-outs in the speech, but the fact sheet spends more time on a public stockpile of critical minerals, reversing a grievous error the United States made long ago when it gave China the market in so-called “rare earth” minerals (which are not, in fact, rare). The stockpile builds on Biden administration activities to strengthen critical mineral supply chains; the Defense Production Act was invoked last year to restart a lithium project in North Carolina and an antimony project in Idaho.
There was hawkish rhetoric against China in the speech, but it goes further in the fact sheet, connecting to a recent action aimed at blocking the entry of “counterfeit and unsafe” consumer items. Other measures are trade actions like enforcing anti-dumping laws and stopping Chinese-mandated technology transfer, which fall in line with the approach of current U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai. I didn’t expect to see demands for China to stop undermining American shipbuilding, for example.
Meanwhile, the same Buy America requirements would remain in place, according to the fact sheet, and even extend to contracting. And with a massive fight on taxes coming up next year, highlighting the ways that multinationals hide their profits in tax havens, and tapping that as a way to offset these investments, puts a new dimension of that debate on the table.
Beyond the fact sheet, Harris released an 82-page policy book, and while it highlights the manufacturing, care economy, and housing production agendas she’s expressed elsewhere, it also emphasizes revitalizing competition in the food sector, fighting abusive practices by pharmaceutical middlemen and the drug industry, eliminating junk fees, stopping algorithmic price-fixing in rental markets, and watchdogging the bulk purchases of corporate landlords. As the links show, these also build on the current administration’s successes; whenever Harris needs to highlight her record, she invariably reaches back to something Biden’s antitrust officials have done.
There’s a school of thought that if people like me aren’t disappointed in a Democratic presidential campaign seeking the median voter, someone’s not doing their job. (I don’t really think the median voter cares at all about crypto, as surveys indicate.) If Harris feels like she has to play a pro-business moderate to get elected, what I will say is that she’d better get elected. Congressional candidates in close contests have dug into the old-time populism, for what it’s worth.
But if you set aside rhetoric, you’ve got a continuation of the worker-centered industrial policies that Biden succeeded in bringing forward. I doubt the feasibility of a large governing agenda, given the precarious Democratic hold on the U.S. Senate. There’s a better chance of continuity than change. This blueprint on domestic economics falls toward the former.
