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August 23, 2024 - 7:30am
As the Democratic National Convention wraps up in Chicago this week, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are preparing for a final sprint over the next 73 days. In this time, they will compete for the small slice of the country’s electorate living in battleground states who will decide the presidential election. A key focus of both candidates’ messages to these voters is likely to be the economy, and over the past week we’ve had a sense of what this will look like for the Democrats. That is, an attempt to reclaim economic populism.
This has been evident in a couple of ways. For a start, the party is embracing organised labour — longtime allies of Harris — more tightly than ever. At the outset of the convention, presidents of several of the country’s top unions took turns enthusiastically endorsing her as attendees held signs and chanted: “Union yes!” A prime speaking slot went to Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, whom Donald Trump made a point of attacking during his own convention speech. In addition to endorsing Harris, Fain took the opportunity to lay into the GOP nominee, calling him a “scab” and asserting that it has been much easier for workers to organise under Joe Biden than under his White House predecessor.
The prominence of labour at the convention is a sign Democrats understand that the institution remains one of their last remaining lifelines to the working class — and that they have work to do to shore up the support of union households, which have been slipping away from them towards Trump. In 2020, Biden won 56% of these voters, marking the second-lowest vote share for a Democratic nominee in nearly 30 years, besting only Hillary Clinton’s 51%. A major driver of this has been the Rightward swing among white union voters, who are more culturally conservative than the Democrats’ base. It remains to be seen whether the party’s overtures on workers’ issues are enough to bridge that divide, but they certainly can’t hurt.
Additionally, Harris has begun rolling out an economic policy agenda for her second term that aims to address a key issue for voters, including those who are undecided: the cost of living. Specifically, she claimed last night that she will work to “create jobs, grow our economy, and lower the cost of everyday needs like health care, housing, and groceries”. This includes going after corporations that practise price-gouging, both by imposing penalties on rule-breaking companies and cracking down on unfair mergers which have helped consolidate the food industry. Though economists have broadly pushed back, saying the causes of inflation are multifaceted, many voters — including a majority of Republicans — are supportive.
Harris’s other major policy rollout was designed to help blunt the rising cost of housing. At the core of this idea is an expansion of the nation’s housing supply, which she would facilitate by offering a tax credit to homebuilders who sell starter homes to first-time buyers. This would be coupled with $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time buyers, something that Republicans in Congress have already shot down as an inflationary measure but that a majority of Americans support.
Among Harris’s most populist measures is a call to raise $5 trillion in taxes by increasing the burden of the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Though similar calls to reduce income inequality and the national deficit via a more progressive tax code have previously faced rocky political terrain in Congress, most Americans — including a near-majority of Republicans — are supportive. Perhaps just as importantly, swing voters say this policy is among those likeliest to move them to vote for Harris. She also plans to complement this with a middle-class tax cut.
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SubscribeWhat matters in Presidential elections is not who the candidate is or which policies they tout on the stump, but who is paying for the campaign, because that determines what policies the candidate will pursue once in office. Harris is every bit as much a Wall Street candidate as Biden, Obama and both Clintons before her.
So your vaunted exception is Donald Trump, an actual oligarch?
At least Mitt Romney had an anchoring faith, and an evident decency.
It is telling that even a mild migration towards the postwar economy is considered ‘populist’. Back in that age, the 50s and 60s, neoliberal ideas were actually considered extremist and outdated, but they are still largely mainstream now. Despite failing on many occasions.
That is almost a reason to be optimistic since economist have been wrong on so many occasions in the 21st century. And they just keep clinging to their economic dogma’s. That said, the housing crisis is because of asset inflation caused by central banks. Giving first time buyers 25k pumps up the bubble even further. And honestly, it isn’t even enough, many home owners got at least 200k virtual value out of nothing. Something must be done to deflate the bubble.
Although both parties are by and for the oligarchs it is a bigger step for republicans to embrace the economic policies that will actually be beneficial for the working class voters I think. Can they trick them once more with stories like trickle down? On other hand, the democrats have alienated and even betrayed working class voters, that is hard to forget. In Europe some social democrats are starting to figure out that left wing economics combined with a ‘cultural conservatism’ might get them back into power. However, I don’t think the democrats will make that shift any time soon.
In Britain the housing crisis is as much a consequence of mass immigration and over-regulation as it is of central bank action – though I’d agree that QE has played a major part as well. We’ve basically created a system under which productive activity is taxed in order to reward the rent seeking of a parasitic metropolitan class, all the while wondering why our economy remains stagnant.
Well, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation as far as I can see. Everywhere in the West we see a housing crisis correlating with the monetary policy. At the same time we usually see that very few new houses are being realized while migration is also high. Could it be connected? If you think about it, scarcity and keeping demand high is basically not a bug but a feature when you have a bubble and you want to engage in rent seeking.
Yay Kamela is lying and making lots of empty promises, yay! It’s like when Biden pushed through a student loan forgiveness program right before the midterms. A program he knew wouldn’t work he knew was unconstitutional and that everyone knew was going to get struck down immediately. That’s been consistent with the left recently say ormake whatever promises sound good and promptly forget them as soon as the election cycle is over.
Not to mention she’s already the incumbent right now I mean it’s been clearly demonstrated Joe isn’t running the country so whoever the hell is isn’t going to let cackling Kamela change things too much.
As a final point
> This would be coupled with $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time buyers,
This is an absolutely idiotic policy that will do nothing to help costs of housing all it will do is make it more unaffordable as it introduces a ton of new money into the supply but only for one thing. This is the exact same problem we saw with college costs as soon as the government started promising everyone money for college the cost of college skyrocketed.
As evidence of this what are the three things in the US that people complain about the out of control price on healthcare, college and housing. Which three areas does the government subsidize most heavily and does the government give the most money to help people with? Healthcare, through Medicare and Medicade, college with student grants and loans, and housing by offering numerous tax breaks for home owners.
These policies are as idiotic as price controls and taxing unrealized capital gains they will destroy this country. If we really wanted to change things we should be looking to what Argentina is doing as they are one of the only increasing economies in the world, not following in the path of idiotic failing states like Brazil.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. — George Bernard Shaw
Kamala – airhead, all style, no substance. Obama in a pants suit.
Looking to any kind of quasi-socialist command economy as an answer remains the delusional rabbit hole that it ever was.
In recent decades the Democrat Left re-oriented itself from its collectivist economics fairytale to its new selective-victimhood /grievance fairytale (and has done immense damage to America’s social and cultural fabric in the process). But if economic policy is back on its agenda then looking to some kind of quasi-socialist command economy as an answer remains the delusional rabbit hole that it ever was. Yes Globalism’s fraying of community bonds is perhaps the greatest threat to all Western societies. But I have my doubts about the ability of ‘economic populism’ to do much about this. I am not a great believer in political solutions….more a believer in unintended political consequences.https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/globalism-vs-national-conservatism