Monday, July 22, 2024

Why Kamala Harris might be worse than Joe Biden

>What follows is from the July 22, 2024 Wall Street Journal As a senator, Harris supported Medicare for All, which would shift the healthcare system from private and employer-based insurance to a government-run program. 

But in 2020, during her run for the White House, she released a more moderate proposal to expand access to Medicare while keeping private insurance intact. And since joining Biden’s presidential ticket, Harris has backed his plan, which calls for building on the Affordable Care Act.On trade, Harris opposed two recent major trade deals that Biden supported, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

Harris was one of just 10 senators who voted against the USMCA, a renegotiated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement under the Trump administration, arguing the environmental provisions were insufficient. 

She also opposed TPP as a Senate candidate, arguing it didn’t do enough to protect the environment and worker regulations. Harris’s climate record has arguably been the most liberal part of her policy portfolio. She has backed the Green New Deal and supported banning fracking. Biden ran on a fracking ban, but only for oil and gas production from federal lands. 

As president, Biden did more to address climate change than any of his predecessors spending $1 trillion in tax credits, grants and loans for clean energy. As a presidential candidate, Harris proposed a full repeal of the 2017 tax cuts enacted by Trump and congressional Republicans.

 Biden as a candidate and as president has backed leaving in place the tax cuts for people making under $400,000 and fully paying for those extensions with new taxes on companies and high-income households. During her campaign, she also favored raising estate taxes. 

 While in the Senate, she proposed an expansive tax credit for lower-income and middle-income workers worth up to $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for married couples. That idea, worth more than $2 trillion over a decade, would have tilted the tax code to be much more progressive. It didn’t make it into the Biden agenda, though it has some similarities to the child tax credit that was in place for 2021.

No comments:

Post a Comment