Maybe we don’t need to wait for an insidery 2025 book about the presidential election to know what happened inside the Kamala Harris campaign in August 2024. Based on the vice president’s new economic policy proposals, it seems pretty likely that Team Harris thinks inflation is a key political weakness—and opportunity. 

That’s why we’re seeing lots of policy ideas built around the “cost of living” theme, such as proposing a “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food, embracing national rent control, offering a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers, and expanding the child tax credit to provide $6,000 per child for families in the first year of a baby’s life. 

One might guess these ideas have been poll-tested and found popular with the voters the campaign is targeting. Hey, you can’t do policy unless you first do politics, as they say here in Washington.

Yet even more than the economic weakness of many of these proposals—especially the ones built on controlling prices from Washington—what’s frustrating here is that the Harris campaign is so close to embracing the notion of “abundance” as a theme. But to do so would require a sounder public grasp of the proper role of markets, the private sector, and government than what is currently being demonstrated. With housing, for instance, I’m thinking about supply-side policies more along the lines of the recent White House announcement that it would “lower housing costs by cutting red tape to build more housing.” Another idea worth considering: linking federal infrastructure and housing funds to cities’ and regions’ progress on relaxing land-use restrictions.

But don’t stop with housing. Just as important, if not more so, is energy abundance. Cheap and plentiful clean energy is needed to power this American century. Both Harris and Donald Trump should be discussing policies to expand nuclear and geothermal, two energy sources currently experiencing lots of innovation, especially among startups. Maybe it’s time to revive and update Project Independence, President Richard NIxon’s multi-faceted 1970s effort to break America’s dependence on foreign oil. A new version would focus on developing clean, 24–7 energy sources to make America independent from scarcity.

Well, there are still many weeks left in this campaign for both sides to grab an issue, abundance, that might really strike a chord with the American people.

The post Some Late-Summer Thoughts on the Emerging Kamala Harris Economic Agenda appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.