Kamala Harris’ economic agenda

Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential race, there has been (and will be) no shortage of scrutiny of her beliefs and policy preferences. People of faith, in particular, are understandably focused on her radical pro-abortion advocacy and a wide array of far-left views in a hotbed of cultural and social issues.

What may be less familiar to voters is her economic record and belief system. Before the 2020 election, Harris was a U.S. senator representing California but had served less than one term in that office. In that brief and partial stint, she served on the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees but was not especially visible or known in matters of economic policy. (Harris did serve on the Budget Committee for a short period but was rarely visible.) Before her brief time in the U.S. Senate, she served as the attorney general of California for six years, which followed a long run as San Francisco’s district attorney. In other words, across her adult political career, economics has not been the top priority or source of her notoriety and attention.

Having run for president in 2020, she was forced to deliver a bit of a public portfolio on various policy issues, and, of course, we now have her record as vice president in the Biden administration as well. While it is clear that various social issues like abortion animate this candidate more than economic policy, there are several policy positions to analyze.

Perhaps most substantively, Vice President Harris has been a past proponent of “Medicare for All,” including the specific advocacy of a single-payer system that would eliminate private insurance (this issue famously put her to the left of Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign and alongside Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren). It is fair to note that candidate Harris, in 2020, specifically called for an elimination of private insurance before then restating her view as calling for a “10-year transition period” (with all newborns admitted into a single-payer system at birth). The so-called “public option” had been scrapped as part of the 2010 Obamacare legislation (the Affordable Care Act), but Vice President Harris favors implementing it into policy and has gone back and forth on whether or not the public option would allow for competitive private insurance or not.

When it comes to tax policy, specifically the taxes necessary to pay for her multitrillion-dollar expansion of government healthcare, she has favored higher taxes for employers on their insurance costs, higher taxes for those in the “1 percent,” raising the capital gains tax rate from 15 percent to 37 percent, and other higher taxes on income, payroll, and estate value. She has also advocated for the implementation of a transaction tax on all stock and bond trades. It should also be said that she advocated for the Build Back Better legislation that President Biden put before Congress in 2021, which contained trillions of dollars of tax increases on business income, personal income, and investment income. (That legislation died when it could not get adequate Democratic support in the Senate.)

Harris’ energy policy portfolio is perhaps even more noteworthy. She called for a comprehensive ban on fracking in the 2020 campaign, co-sponsored the Green New Deal proposal, and even supported an elimination of the Senate filibuster to pass the legislation. Generic support of green energy spending has been a constant out of the Biden administration, but the more extreme measure of outright banning American extraction of oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling would be devastating to the economy and various strategic and geopolitical objectives.

If there were any two issues that allowed President Biden to successfully brand himself as a moderate in the 2020 Democratic primary race, they were Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Candidate Harris represents a leftward shift even from President Biden as it pertains to these high-profile issues.

When it comes to trade, the Harris campaign will have to tell us where she stands. On the one hand, she has been very critical of President Donald Trump’s tariff proposals (I am as well), but on the other hand, she has joined President Trump in opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Biden administration has not repealed any of the tariffs the Trump administration passed, and Vice President Harris has provided at different times rhetorical support both for and against protectionist positions.

More details are sure to follow throughout the campaign, especially when it comes to Vice President Harris’ economic agenda. What we do know based on her public record is that she holds, or has held, economic positions that are even to the left of President Biden on a wide array of topics. Voters on the right may focus more on her cultural issue positions, but they won’t find much relief when they look under the economic hood.