Harris' economic plan supercharges Biden proposals to fight inflation

Vice President Kamala Harris’ new economic vision sounds a lot like President Joe Biden’s old one — only bigger.

Harris on Friday is set to pitch a plan for lowering Americans’ everyday costs that would hinge largely on supercharging a set of existing administration proposals, arguing that voters would benefit more from building on Biden’s efforts to fight inflation, rather than breaking from them.

The blueprint aims to make housing more affordable, ease health care costs and crack down on corporations that Democrats have blamed for driving up grocery prices. While that largely mirrors the priorities that have guided Biden’s last four years in office, Harris would push them in a far more aggressive direction during the next four.

Harris’ housing plan, for example, would call for constructing three million new homes in a bid to alleviate a supply crunch that’s driven up prices — more than the two million that Biden laid out in his own plan earlier this year. Her health care agenda would focus on expanding a cap on the cost of insulin to all patients, not just the older Americans who are currently covered.

And a new proposal for expanding the child tax credit would provide $6,000 to certain families with children — nearly double the amount that Biden secured during his first year in office.

Much of the agenda would require congressional legislation, making its success dependent in large part on Democrats’ ability to win control of both chambers in addition to the presidency.

But it amounts to an effort to separate Harris from the economic gloom that plagued Biden’s aborted reelection bid without sacrificing his policy goals, many of which her campaign aides and advisers view as remaining broadly popular.

Harris is instead trying to sell an agenda that Biden had long struggled to articulate, adopting more forward-looking rhetoric in her first weeks on the trail — and emphasizing her background as a prosecutor in pledging to more aggressively fight the big businesses that she’s accused of driving the inflation voters broadly rank as their top concern.

"While our economy is doing well by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high," Harris said during a rally in Detroit last week, vowing to make fighting inflation a "day one" priority if elected. "You know it, and I know it."

Harris will debut her economic agenda in a speech on Friday in North Carolina, just two days after Trump delivered his own pitch in a sprawling speech in the same state that touched only partially on his economic vision.

In addition to pitching more expansive versions of current administration proposals, Harris is expected to call for a slate of new tax incentives designed to spur the construction of affordable housing. She will also advocate pouring $40 billion into an “innovation fund” meant to encourage local governments to find ways to build more housing — enlarging an existing $20 billion proposal. The agenda would also endorse legislation designed to ease rent prices by making it more difficult for investment companies to purchase large numbers of rental homes.

Harris plans as well to push for restoring an expanded child tax credit that Congress passed in 2021 but let expire several months later. That credit would increase to $6,000 for families in the first year of a child’s life under her blueprint.

And on health care, Harris is expected to take up ongoing efforts to expand provisions passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that capped insulin costs and out-of-pocket expenses, while also pushing to speed the government’s negotiation of certain medicines under Medicare. She will back state-level efforts to cancel medical debt for certain Americans, her campaign said.

Harris’ campaign earlier this week also outlined a series of proposals aimed at lowering the grocery costs that have played an outsized role in voters’ pessimism on the economy, calling for legislation that would impose a federal ban on price gouging and pledging to pour resources into efforts to combat anticompetitive behavior that risks driving up the cost of food.

The proposals come as inflation has slowed — with the annual inflation rate hitting its lowest point in July since 2021 — though “inflation and the cost of living” ranked as the most important issue for voters surveyed in a CNBC poll released last week, with the voters who prioritized the issue favoring Trump over Harris by a 12-point margin.