Vice President Kamala Harris has what she used to call a 3 a.m. agenda. To be an effective president, she’ll need to add a 3 p.m. agenda.
Let me explain. When Harris was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, she put out a television ad that was pretty effective. She described how her mother, after putting the girls to bed, “would sit up trying to figure out how to make it all work,” presumably sometimes until 3 in the morning.
Harris said her 3 a.m. agenda was “a real plan to help you solve those worries,” including a big middle-class tax cut paid for by repealing the Trump tax cuts for high earners and corporations; Medicare for all; and fines for companies that don’t give women equal pay. “Because,” she intoned, “you’ve waited long enough to get a good night’s sleep.”
At the time, Harris was positioning herself as a liberal in an election that had the Democrats moving well to the left. She suspended her campaign in December 2019 and endorsed Joe Biden, a career centrist who himself shifted leftward to fight off the challenges of Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
We’re already hearing more about the 3 a.m. agenda — without that label or those precise policy positions — now that Harris is the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. In a speech in West Allis, Wis., this week, she promised a “people-first presidency” that would deliver affordable health care and child care and paid family leave.
It makes sense for Harris to present herself as someone who cares about how ordinary Americans are feeling in the middle of the night. First, because it seems heartfelt. “I think she is personally much more passionate about the care side of the agenda” than other aspects of economic policy, Ernie Tedeschi, who was until this year the chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and now is director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab, told The Times.
Second, because Harris knows she can’t afford to let Republicans grab the votes of ordinary working people with populist pitches. With Senator JD Vance of Ohio on his ticket, Donald Trump is making a play for the votes of working-class Americans, casting the Republican Party as the enemy of the elites.
Harris’s job — which she’s doing with gusto — is to smash Trump’s narrative. She seems more focused and joyful than I remember her as a presidential candidate in 2019, or even during her vice-presidential campaign in 2020.
So, what’s the 3 p.m. economic agenda? It’s about the issues that may not disturb voters in the middle of the night, but do have to be dealt with in the clear light of day.
The best example of a 3 p.m. agenda item is the federal budget — specifically, how to deal with the mounting federal debt and the impending exhaustion of the Social Security Trust Funds. Inevitably, solving the problem will require some combination of tax increases and cuts in projected spending.
Politicians don’t like making hard budgetary choices when in office, and they like even less talking about them on the campaign trail. Harris would lose votes if she started getting all think-tank-serious about budget deficits while Trump blew off the problem (as his party’s platform does) or repeated his past wild promises to wipe out the federal debt.
But if Harris manages to defeat Trump, she will need that 3 p.m. agenda. A good resource, I suggest, is a new compilation by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation of proposals from seven research institutions, ranging from liberal to conservative, to fix the nation’s finances over the next 30 years.
The organizations differed, of course, on whether the financial fix should come mainly on the spending side or mainly on the tax side, and on how the burden should be split between rich and poor. There were some interesting overlaps, though. A bunch of the think tanks came out for eliminating or curbing the deductibility of interest, including on mortgage loans, since the tax break induces excessive borrowing. Another idea that got a fair amount of support is taxing capital gains at death. Under the current tax code, people can pass along untaxed gains to their heirs, who owe tax only on gains made after they inherit.
The Progressive Policy Institute, one of the seven, argued that public investments in education, infrastructure and scientific research should grow at the same pace as the overall economy “to ensure a consistent share of resources are devoted to pro-growth spending.”
I agree. If anything I’d say the spending should grow faster than the overall economy to make up for years of underinvestment. Ultimately, the nation’s ability to cover its bills will depend on its productive capacity, and the best way to increase that capacity is to invest in people, ideas and physical capital. The Biden administration is very much in that camp, as evidenced by the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other measures. So Harris has a good foundation to start from. (She can also point to the proposed deficit reduction in the Biden administration’s budget plan, issued in March.)
Harris majored in economics at Howard University, and her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. She may not have focused on economics during her career as a prosecutor, a U.S. senator and a vice president, but she knows the field. Now is her chance to draw on economics to help ensure that Americans enjoy a good night’s sleep not just tonight but for years to come.
The Readers Write
Excellent article on national rankings of Olympic participants. It would also be interesting to see a trend line of the rankings over, say, 20 Olympics (with a flag on the data points for host nations). Another ranking could be government spending per medal won.
Richard Jackson
Brisbane, Australia (“Olympic host 2032!!”)
Medal rankings serve no useful purpose. Ban them. The athletes compete and win, not the countries. What should be celebrated is the willingness of athletes from around the world to fairly compete against one another.
Steven Yedlin
Santa Barbara, Calif.
You wrote about the tariffs of President William McKinley. As his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, argued, under a tariff system, the importers, the manufacturers, and the (in general) moneyed classes largely avoid being taxed, and the people who actually buy the tariffed commodity bear all of the burden. Also, domestic manufacturers are given license to increase the cost of their commodities to mirror the artificially increased costs of imported goods, once again to the disadvantage of the end user.
David Waterson
Houston
The first anti-dumping law was enacted by Canada in 1904 in response to predatory exports by U.S. Steel. That emerging steel giant was of course protected from foreign competition by the high McKinley tariffs. New Zealand and Australia followed Canada’s lead in the next two years, seeking protection from the International Harvester Trust, which also benefited from protective tariffs.
Charles Blum
Sedona, Ariz.
The writer is a former assistant U.S. trade representative.
Quote of the Day
“Time and again, U.S. citizens and leaders have rationalized unethical actions with financial justifications. Mid-20th-century white suburbanites who were resistant to Black people moving in next door, for example, often said they personally didn’t mind Black neighbors, but that they feared for their own homes’ property value.”
— Louise Story and Ebony Reed, “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap” (2024)
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