The Most Striking Proposals in Harris’s Economic Plan

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has released an economic plan with some bold proposals.

The vice president, who will be speaking in North Carolina on Friday, has several policy proposals, including eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, banning price gouging of food and groceries, capping the prices of insulin and other prescriptions, and granting a $6,000 tax credit for newborn children in their first year.

Since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election last month and Harris took on the Democratic nomination, Harris’s campaign has not been heavy on specific policies. This is one of the first, if not the first, detailed plans the campaign has released. Not only does it continue Biden’s policy of economic intervention, it goes much further than many of his proposals.

For example, Harris’s plan also includes assistance of up to $25,000 for first-time homebuyers, and the ban on price gouging would take punitive measures against grocery stores whose price hikes are deemed excessive. Parts of Harris’s plan have already drawn criticism from some Democrats.

“The good-case scenario is price gouging is a message, not a reality, and the bad-case scenario is that this is a real proposal,” said economist Jason Furman, who worked in the Obama administration. “You’ll end up with bigger shortages, less supply, and ultimately risk higher prices and worse outcomes for consumers if you try to enforce this in a real way, which I don’t know if they would or wouldn’t do.”

Harris has already faced pressure from executives and business leaders hoping to change antitrust policies and push out Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. While antitrust policy is not part of the economic policies just proposed by Harris, her willingness to offer transformative measures that could drastically improve the lives of many Americans may indicate that she’s willing to take on corporations to the same extent as Biden, and perhaps even further than that.

After all, her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was renowned in Minnesota for instituting one of the most generous child tax credit plans in the country, free school meals, and paid family leave. Harris’s plan is sure to win over much of the left, at least when it comes to economics. Perhaps the next step is overhauling Biden’s disastrous Israel policy, which continues to cause a humanitarian crisis through supporting the brutal war on Gaza.

Donald Trump’s presser Thursday was a scattered assortment of unrelated topics. Despite his campaign’s attempts to rein Trump in and focus his attention on attacking Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies via a narrowly tailored mini-rally, Trump went on an hour-long, mostly unscripted tirade. It was, ultimately, a who’s who of his favorite talking points, including Harris’s alleged “stupidity,” the war in Afghanistan, Covid-19, and migrant crime, with barely any mention made of inflation—or the groceries symbolically propped up inches away from him—for which the entire event was organized.

The new Trump format also attracted an odd variety of attendees. While press conferences typically only attract press, Trump’s Thursday arrangement saw the presence of several curious attendees, including journalists who only lobbed softball questions at the Republican presidential nominee, and another group of people that Trump referred to as “fans” who were overjoyed by some of the darker moments of Trump’s rambling speech.

Responding to a question from a reporter about why “God saved your life” during the assassination attempt, Trump said that “God had something to do with it.” But the back-end of his answer on what he believed God saved him for got a little weirder.

“And maybe it’s, we want to save the world,” Trump continued. “This world is going down. This world is going down.”

That, for whatever reason, elicited a roar from a crowd nearby.

“But I believe that. I believe that. My sons are very good shooters,” Trump expanded, claiming that his sons Eric and Don Jr. were excellent shots who said that the 130-yard distance between Trump and his would-be shooter was akin to a “one-foot putt,” and told their father that a “bad shooter would hit the target almost 100 percent of the time.”

Cereal, coffee, milk, and breakfast sausages sat displayed on a table in the 87-degree heat of Bedminster, New Jersey, mere feet away from Donald Trump as he held a press conference at his golf club Thursday, his second in as many weeks. 

More than a prop, the food might have served as a signal to the meandering Republican nominee to stay on the topic du jour: inflation. Instead, the groceries served as a cringeworthy visual cue for those watching, and became increasingly absurd as Trump continually refused to acknowledge them. Try as he might, Trump just couldn’t stay on topic, and took off on a winding rant that repelled structure and meaning.

Despite the fact he began by reading from notes, which sat in a binder in front of him, Trump repeatedly, and for long stretches of time, went off-script into an array of insane claims and random stories. 

Trump made the severely inaccurate claim that Harris was responsible for a California law that allowed for people to rob stores of goods with a total value under $950—of course, the state penal code actually says that a shoplifter will be charged with petty theft for stealing goods worth $950 or less, and grand theft if it’s more. 

He detoured into his typical racist fearmongering about undocumented immigrants, telling a strange story about watching ICE agents beating up “packs” of MS13 “killers.” Trump warned Americans that under Harris, they might get a system where “everybody gets health care,” ranted about windmills ruining “gorgeous fields” and killing birds, and bragged that he was buddies with the head of the Taliban because he’d once allegedly called Trump “your excellency.” 

After nearly an hour of non-stop talking (not to mention, taking no questions from the press) Trump finally gave a nod to the assortment of food behind him, scoffing at the price tags. But he predictably changed the subject back to call Harris “Margaret Thatcher, the liberal version.”

Trump’s allies have become increasingly concerned that the Republican candidate can’t stay on message to save his life. His team has adopted a new strategy, of smaller single-issue events, meant to keep the former president on task—but their first such event, held Wednesday and meant to focus on the economy, predictably descended into chaos.  

J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments. 

The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.

In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.”

In another post from 2017, Murphy wrote about an alleged rape of a 14-year-old Maryland girl by two immigrants from central America and said  “sanctuary cities” were the problem for “defying the federal government” by “welcoming massive numbers of immigrants into their neighborhoods.”

“However, the tragedy of a young girl getting raped in the bathroom at school just might be what turns the attention of limousine liberals from the brainwashing narrative of the Democrats and towards a more sane approach to immigration,” the post read. Later in 2017, the charges were dropped against the immigrants in question.

In 2018, Murphy’s posts got him in trouble with his employer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, where he was the senior manager of finance, analysis, and strategy, and was placed on administrative leave. He has since denied accusations that he is a white nationalist or part of the extremist “alt-right” movement.

Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.

“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”

How is Vance going to explain odd, if not xenophobic, comments about white, European immigrants from the early 20th century? Much like his remarks about “childless cat ladies” or his thoughts on “the postmenopausal female,” he’s going to be spending some time trying to put these comments in some kind of context.

Elon Musk is pouring his heart and soul (and cold hard cash) into electing Donald Trump this November.

New Federal Election Commission filings on Wednesday show that Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC has ramped up its operations, spending an initial $5.8 million. Most of that money, $3.6 million, has gone toward canvassing and field operations.

The political action committee has thus far raised $8.8 million with donations from Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and the crypto tycoons the Winklevoss twins. Meanwhile, America PAC is under investigation in North Carolina and Michigan for collecting personal data under the guise of registering voters.

Musk initially seemed to promise a monthly donation of $45 million to the Super PAC, then in July told Jordan Peterson that the rumor “is simply not true.” He did donate to the PAC last month, but the amount will remain unknown until the political action committee’s next quarterly report with the FEC in October. Put another way, we currently know very little about how much Musk is spending to influence the November election.

What we do know, however, is that Musk is sinking time and energy into getting voters to polls for Trump. According to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week, Musk has been attending hour-long weekly meetings with his America PAC, with the goal of raising turnout for the former president in battleground states and bringing out 800,000 voters to the polls. According to a new FEC rule, campaigns can consult with Super PACs on get-out-the-vote initiatives.