Planet Money - What Kamala Harris' economic agenda might look like

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Last weekend we were all thrown for a loop when President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris for the nomination. Just like everyone else, we are trying to quickly wrap our heads around what it means now that Harris is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee for president. We expect to see the Harris campaign come out with some official policy proposals in the coming weeks and months. But for now, all we've got are clues, little breadcrumbs that she has dropped throughout her career that might lead us to a rough idea of what economic policies she might support. Today on the show, we're going to visit three key moments from Harris' political career that might give us an idea of how her economic agenda might look. First, the 2019 presidential primary debates, where she laid out her own economic policies. Next, a vote in her Senate years that shows where she might fall on future trade agreements. And finally, a fight with some of the country's biggest banks from her very first year as Attorney General of California. This episode was hosted by Keith Romer and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Emma Peaslee, edited by Jess Jiang with help from Meg Cramer, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez and Sofia Shchukina. Engineering by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In this country, some truths aren't self-evident. In NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of stories is wide-ranging and real as the people who tell them we celebrate the Black experience for all its soul and richness. Search NPR Black Stories, Black Truths wherever you get podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. Okay, looks like it's Kamala Harris, presidential candidate. Yeah, like the rest of the country, we are trying to very quickly make sense of what it means now that Kamala Harris is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee for president, especially what it means in economic terms. For the past four years, it's been really hard to figure out what Harris's strongly

held beliefs were because, well, her publicly facing beliefs, they were her bosses. That's the whole point of being vice president. You serve at the pleasure of the president. Your official policy positions are, by and large, replaced by theirs. But it's not like Kamala Harris spent her entire career in the vice presidential policy vacuum. No, before she was VP, she was a presidential candidate herself. Before that, a senator. Before that, attorney general of California. Before that, an economics major and daughter of an economics professor.

And in at least some of those phases of her life, she took real stances on issues that are wonky enough for your favorite neighborhood economics show to want to dig into. Hello and welcome to Play to Money. I'm Nick Fountain. And I'm Keith Romer. We're in this unprecedented moment of political uncertainty where the president of the United States dropped out of the presidential race three and a half months before an election. And now we all have to get our heads around this new candidate and try to figure out how much she's Joe Biden 2.0

and how much she's going to make her own way economically. Right now, all we've got are clues, little breadcrumbs that Kamala Harris has dropped throughout her career that might lead us to, well, at least a rough idea of what economic policies she might support. Today on the show, three moments from the last couple of decades of Kamala Harris's life that might help us start to put that puzzle together. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes together.

Black perspectives haven't always been centered in the telling of America's story. Now we're taking center stage. Introducing NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of black-led stories from NPR's podcasts. Search NPR Black Stories, Black Truths wherever you get your podcasts. Black Stories, Black Truths, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people in communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org. Okay. So the obvious way to try to figure out what economic policies presidential candidate Kamala Harris might support is to look at what economic policies presidential candidate

Kamala Harris did support, you know, the last time she ran for president. Yeah, 2019 was the last time Kamala Harris really had a chance to argue for her own policies in front of the entire country, or at least the people who watch the Democratic debates. So let's take a look at one economic policy she talked about in those debates, taxes. In 2019, Harris essentially proposed taking more from the rich and corporations and redistributing it to people who have less. For too long, the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most

and not in favor of the people who work the most, which is why I am proposing that we change the tax code. Republicans had made a big change to the tax code under President Donald Trump. They'd cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Candidate Joe Biden argued that the rate should go back some of the way to 28%. Candidate Kamala Harris said the tax cut should be repealed altogether, presumably go back to the original 35%. She also wanted to increase taxes on some banks and get rid of Trump's tax cuts for people with higher incomes. And on day one, I will repeal that tax bill that benefits the top 1 percent and the biggest

corporations of America. And on the other side of the ledger, Harris had a plan for how to redistribute that money to folks lower on the economic ladder. So for every family that is making less than $100,000 a year, they will receive a tax credit that they can collect at $500 a month, which will make all the difference between those families being able to get through the end of the month with dignity and with support or not. She also proposed helping out renters, expanding paid family and medical leave, and raising

teachers' salaries. Yeah, as a presidential candidate in 2019, Kamala Harris was kind of center-left on economic policy. Not all the way out with Bernie Sanders, who wanted to really, really, really expand the social safety net, or with Elizabeth Warren, who, like Sanders, was calling for a wealth tax, but a smidge to the left of Joe Biden. Now obviously what a candidate will promise in a debate and what they can actually accomplish if they are elected president can look very different. Joe Biden's plan to raise corporate tax rates to 28 percent, that never happened.

But he was still calling for it in his most recent budget proposal. But one thing that tends to be a little easier for a president to influence is how the country interacts with the rest of the world. You know, diplomatic relations, military policy, and trade policy. And trade, that's where we're going next. Yeah, for the second moment we're going to look at in Harris's economic policy history, we called up Sabrina Rodriguez,

a national political reporter at the Washington Post. Hey, uh, thank you for taking the time. Thank you so much for having me. We caught up with her on the campaign trail. She was in Indiana for a Kamala Harris event. The day before, she'd been in Virginia for a JD Vance rally. Wow. You're really in the thick of it.

It's called trying to survive. And the reason we called Sabrina is not just because she's a campaign reporter, she is also a former trade reporter. Do you think your heart is more in trade policy reporting or political reporting? Oh, um, I think I'm always going to have like a piece of my heart as corny as that

sounds on trade reporting because it's where I got my start and it's how I started my career covering it. Sabrina has been thinking a lot about Harris's trade policy and this one thing that Harris did when she was a U.S. Senator. Because while the president has most of the power in defining the country's trade policy, the House and Senate still have to vote on any new trade deals. And the way Harris voted on one of those trade deals offers a clue about the approach she might take as president when it comes to trade.

The deal in question was called the USMCA. She took a vote on the USMCA. Please don't do that. Nick, I asked you not to sing that song. It stood, USMCA stood for the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement. It was the deal that the Trump administration hammered out after he threatened to pull the US out of the previous trade agreements between those countries, NAFTA. But for the new USMCA to become law, it still had to get through Congress. And before that, a bunch of committees, including the Senate Budget Committee, which then Senator Kamala Harris just so happened to sit on.

Now, prominent Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, had come out in support of ratifying the USMCA. They said there was a lot to liken it, like protections for workers, which might lead you to expect that all the Democratic senators would line up behind it when it came up for the committee vote. They did the vote. Everyone said yes. And then I like kind of couldn't hear what Kamala Harris said. And those votes happened so quickly that it was like, okay, meeting adjourned. And I remember distinctly, I like went up to her and was like, Senator Harris, could you repeat how you voted?

And she was like, I voted no. Oh, what reason did she give? So the primary reason that she gave in the case of the US Mexico Canada agreement was environmental standards. Yeah, she said the deal didn't do enough on climate. She put out a statement that said, by not addressing climate change, the USMCA fails to meet the crises of this moment.

And this wasn't the first time Harris opposed a trade deal because of environmental concerns. Back in 2016, when she was running for Senate, she also opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal the Obama administration had negotiated, this time for environmental and labor protection reasons. So for those keeping track at home on the two big trade deals of the last decade, Kamala Harris has been a no. Still, she has insisted that she's not anti-free trade and not, quote, a protectionist Democrat. And she did come out pretty strongly against the tariffs that President Trump put in place

on things like solar panels and washing machines and steel, saying those tariffs have increased prices for consumers. Though we should note, since then, the Biden administration has also been pretty busy on the tariff front, especially around green energy and China. If only we knew a former trade reporter who was about to jump in a Kamala Harris press scrum. I know that as you follow her on the campaign trail, you're going to be asking her all the wonky trade questions. Absolutely.

If I get a question in, well, if I get a few questions in, I will definitely be making one of them trade. It's not going to be the first question. It will not be the first question. I do have a job I would like to keep covering politics, but given the opportunity, I would throw one in there. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Sabrina gets to the bottom of this one.

After the break, a Kamala Harris deep cut. We go back to a time when she first started making a name for herself in national politics by taking on some big banks and breaking with the Obama administration. and breaking with the Obama administration. China increasingly targets its critics overseas. Last summer, the family of a Chinese dissident was accused of making bomb threats they said they had nothing to do with. I think the Chinese government is treating us so badly to show its power.

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and cuts through the noise. Listen to 1A, where we celebrate your freedom to listen by getting to the heart of the story together, only from NPR. Okay, so far we have focused on Kamala Harris's relatively recent political history as a presidential candidate and as a senator, but we were curious what else we could glean about what her economic policies might look like by going a little further back in her timeline. Right, so fun fact, Kamala Harris's dad

is a man named Donald J. Harris. I mean, the psychological richness of running for president of the United States against Donald J. Trump when your dad is Donald J. Harris? Though really, Nick, in the end, are we not all just running for president against our dads metaphorically? Oh. Sure.

Anyways, Donald J. Harris just so happens to be an emeritus econ professor at Stanford. He published a bunch of papers in big econ journals about economic growth and development, some about Marxist theory. Yeah, one's called On Marx's Scheme of Reproduction and Accumulation, another one, Capital Distribution and the Aggregate Production Function. But she and her dad are different people. So ultimately, we decided that spending a bunch of time digging into his work was neither particularly useful nor particularly fair

as a way of understanding her. So then we were like, maybe there's something to learn from the fact that Kamala Harris herself was a poli-sci and economics major as an undergrad at Howard University. But we couldn't find much there. You know, there was no senior thesis called what my economic policy as president of the United States will be. Instead, for our last moment

in Kamala Harris economic policy history, we reached out to Dan Moraine, author of the 2021 biography, Kamala's Way, and all of a sudden, a very popular man with journalists. You know, I mean, I wrote this book and the goal was to have it published before the inauguration. And I thought that this would be sort of the end of my involvement with Kamala Harris. No, it turns out no. Yeah, we talked to Dan yesterday morning at 440 a.m. his time, because that was the only

time he had left on his schedule. So thank you, Dan, for getting up so early. We went to Dan so he would tell us this one last story about the moment Kamala Harris first started making waves on the national stage. It's a story that maybe gives this little glimpse into Harris's true economic policy heart or maybe just her political ambition depending how you look at it. The story starts 14 years ago in California. So Kamala Harris runs for attorney general in 2010, narrowly wins. And one of the things Harris inherits with her new job is this question about what to do about the mortgage crisis in California.

Remember, the country was dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis, and housing in California in particular was this giant mess. Thousands of people are losing their homes. They can't pay their mortgages. And it's become clear that some banks and mortgage lenders have been cutting corners on the foreclosure process. And some of the people who lost their homes should have been protected.

Obama's Department of Justice had gotten together with state attorneys general from around the country to negotiate with five of these giant banks, to get them to fix the system, to offer some money to people who were wrongly foreclosed on, and to give debt relief to other people in danger of foreclosure. And they got pretty close to finalizing an agreement. Yeah, just about all the other attorneys general wanted to take this deal.

And President Obama, he's about to go up for re-election. So his administration wanted to notch some kind of a win against big banks. But Kamala Harris hadn't agreed to sign on yet. There's a lot of pressure on her to settle. She makes clear though that she's looking for something different. Yeah, this is when Harris made this kind of gamble. She decided she was willing to go against the other AGs and the Obama administration. She walked away from the negotiations and threatened to pull out of this proposed nationwide

deal altogether. Unless California got more than the $2 to $4 billion the banks were offering. And it worked. Instead of getting a $2 or $3 or $4 billion settlement, she ended up getting closer to $20 billion in debt relief for California. And to try to make sure all the mortgage problems wouldn't just happen again, she went to work lobbying for this new piece of legislation called the California Homeowners Bill of Rights. The bill offered new protections to homeowners facing foreclosure and increased the power of the state government to go after shady mortgage lenders. Dan says Attorney General Harris could be pretty persuasive. Everybody knows that Kamala Harris is a politician on the rise. This is not somebody you want to trifle with.

This is not somebody if you're a legislator you want to get sideways with on a bill that she really cares about. And at the end of the day, all her lobbying paid off. Today we are here to say we're done. The bill was passed and signed into law. We are done with abusive tactics and empty promises. We're done. We're done. Is there any lesson here for what a potential president, Kamala Harris, might be like?

Well, you know, we'll have to see. But I think you can assume that if the choice is between a bank and a middle class homeowner, she's gonna go with the homeowner. I mean, I just, I don't think that there's a lot of doubt about that. Okay, there are a few ways to read this last episode. On the one hand, taking on big banks to protect California homeowners is kind of the job

of the attorney general. And if you're politically ambitious, it's a nice feather in your cap to get a win like this. But nearly all the other attorneys general did go along with the original settlement with the banks. They didn't break ranks with the Obama administration and try to get more for their constituents. So maybe there was something genuinely

pro-consumer protection-y, maybe even a little bit populist about how Harris played it. This is a hard exercise that we've set ourselves. It's impossible. Obviously, three days into this new reality, we are still struggling to read Kamala Harris's record, to know just what kind of policies she's going to put forward on economics and on everything else. Whether it'll be mostly a continuation of what Biden was up to, or whether she'll take more of a path of her own.

But Kamala Harris did just give her first real rally as new presidential candidate Harris yesterday in Milwaukee. So there are some new clues for us to pour over. yesterday in Milwaukee. So there are some new clues for us to pour over. We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead. A future where no child has to grow up in poverty. She also said she supports people's freedom to join a union, wants everybody to have affordable healthcare, affordable child care, and paid family leave. So all of this is to say, building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.

As for the details of how that goal could be achieved, we may still have to wait a bit. It's going to be patient, Nick. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. Yeah, maybe by November. A little programming note for those of you who are heartbroken not to find the Planet Money Summer School episode today in your feed. That will be running on Friday and it'll be about the birth of finance.

It's a good one. Today's episode was heroically produced by Emma Peasley and heroically edited by Jess Zhang with help from Meg Kramer. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and Sofia Shukuna. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Keith Romer. And I'm Nick Fountain.

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