Kamala Harris

Christian Britschgi | 9.20.2024 2:40 PM

Vice President Kamala Harris is an ideas candidate. That's what a string of recent opinion pieces about her economic agenda try to convince us of anyway.

In a Tuesday column, The Washington Post's Heather Long writes that she sees in Harris' "opportunity economy"—that grab bag of subsidies to businesses large and small, price controls on food and housing, tariffs on imported goods, tax credits for parents, and a call to build 3 million new homes—a coherent philosophy of "fair capitalism" or "middle-class capitalism."

Harris is breaking from the left-right dichotomy, says Long, with her plan to both build things and create new subsidies. Her task now is "to define her economic philosophy so that voters can see it—and understand how they fit into it."

In that same vein, a few weeks earlier in The New York Times, former Biden administration economic advisor Jen Harris elaborated on how Vice President Harris was creating a whole new brand of economics focused on "building" (literally building housing, renewable energy, etc.) and "balancing" (price controls, antitrust enforcement, etc.).

Building "focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims," while balancing "corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes........

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