Harris Will Have to Own Bidenomics in Tuesday's Debate
Do independent voters get any clarity on Kamala Harris’ and Donald J. Trump’s policy agendas Tuesday night, or is it all about how, and how much the former president attacks the current vice president personally, and how she responds?
After Trump audience-tested a couple of high school-level adjectives before Harris’ name, and even questioned at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention the ethnicity she has “chosen,” he has finally settled on the prefix title “Comrade.” It’s a Soviet reference that Trump & Co. might have used for any Democratic candidate, of course, except that Harris’ first name adds catchy alliteration, no matter how he pronounces “Kamala.”
No matter how much the policy agenda she describes Tuesday diverts from the current president’s, her economic positions will be based on Bidenomics. In today’s toxic political climate, MAGA Republicans and even the normal kind of Republicans have been able to turn “Bidenomics” into a dirty word. But the last sitting vice president to win the presidential contest, George H.W. Bush, hardly backed away from trickle-down Reaganomics in his campaign (which hurt his re-election chances when the economy went into a recession at the end of his single term), and there is no way and no objective reason for Harris to back away from “middle-class outward” economics.
It’s unlikely that many of the independent voters who hope to decide on their candidate from the Harris-Trump debate will know or care that Bidenomics is the grandchild of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which begat President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society a generation later, or that the whole shebang has been a target – let’s make that the target -- of conservative laissez-faire capitalist Republicans since 1933.
While traditional anti-MAGA Republicans might argue that Trump is nothing like Reagan – whom they often contend would be a “RINO” in today’s GOP -- Trump can legitimately count his agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and desire to have full control of the Federal Reserve as paying homage to the 40th president.
Stiff tariffs expected to reignite inflation and Trump’s threat to deport 20 million illegal immigrants, not so much.
Perhaps the clearest throughline between Reagan and Trump is economist Arthur Laffer’s cocktail napkin Curve of 1974, which posits that a tax rate between 0% and 100% would produce maximum tax revenue for the federal government. Under the Reagan administration’s hands, that meant a deep tax cut that should have prompted entrepreneurs and business owners to boost their productivity and hire the formerly Democratic union workers who switched to Reagan, to work third shifts and overtime in their factories.
Laffer has been an enthusiastic backer of Trump since 2015, and according to the Financial Times, he is a potential second-Trump administration nominee for Fed chairman when Jerome Powell’s term ends in 2026.
Meanwhile, the key difference between Reagan and Trump as presidents is Reagan quickly learned to compromise with Capitol Hill Democrats, most prominently House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA). This means Reagan was unashamed about quickly altering policy direction when it didn’t work as planned (even if he downplayed the direction change), no matter how crucial it was to his core political dogma.
Laffer served as an economic advisor to Reagan for both his full terms, and the president based the tax cuts in his Economic Recovery Act of 1981 on the Curve. But the “stagflation” of the Ford and Carter administrations lingered, and by 1982 Reagan began a series of tax increases that eventually ate up just about all those initial cuts, according to Bloomberg.
To this day, some Republicans for whom Reagan was the greatest president, ever, insist there were no such tax increases. But it seems just as important to Harris’ positions on the economy tonight – whether or not you agree with her policy – that she paints her opponent as the sort of president who would never pull – much less admit to -- a policy reversal like that.
Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings … After you watch the presidential debate tonight, please enter your comments here or at editors@thehustings.news.