How Harris’ Vision for the Economy Could Boost Black Communities
The proposal is the vice president’s latest effort to sharpen her image ahead of the November election.
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to address the costs of housing, food, and health care in a speech in North Carolina on Friday. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
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Before a vibrant crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic agenda — her first big policy proposal since President Joe Biden’s abrupt departure from the race in July.
It was Harris’ latest effort during her warp-speed campaign for the White House to reintroduce herself to voters, who know relatively little about Biden’s lieutenant of the past almost four years.
Harris’ speech wasn’t heavy on details. But she pledged to prioritize lowering the cost of living for struggling Americans — including Black and brown communities — by limiting the costs of housing, food, and health care. She also promised to take on corporate price-gouging, and work to increase the federal minimum wage.
In some ways, Harris offered an updated version of the American Dream.
“This election, I do strongly believe, is about two very different visions for our nation,” she told the enthusiastic audience. “One — ours — focused on the future, and the other focused on the past.”
Harris said that, if elected, she would direct federal resources toward building 3 million new housing units and providing $25,000 to first-time homebuyers for down-payment assistance for the next four years.
And for homebuilders who construct starter homes for these first-time homebuyers, she noted, there ought to be a tax credit.
Harris also personalized her speech. She recounted how excited her mother was when she saved enough money to buy the family a house, and how too many Americans struggle just to get by.
“Look, the bills add up. Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes, prescription medication,” she said. “After all of that, for many families, there’s not much left at the end of the month.”
Emphasis on the need to combat costs could appeal to Black Americans, who are more likely than their white counterparts to be confronted by precarity, even as the economy rebounds.
“These are the types of policies that address vulnerability,” Michael Neal, a senior fellow in the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, told Capital B. “We know that health care and housing are two of the biggest costs in the Personal Consumption Expenditures measure of inflation. We know that the price of groceries tends to be highly volatile. And we know that Black Americans have lower and more volatile incomes that amplify these higher costs.”
Another area is worth our collective attention, too: unemployment. Black Americans don’t just have lower incomes — they also have higher unemployment rates.
The most recent Black unemployment rate available is from
July 2024: 6.3%. The rates from the past few months are low by historical standards,
per a June CNN analysis, though a little bit higher than the record low, 4.8%, from April 2023.
“The potential for high unemployment affects everyone,” Neal said. “But we know from the data that Black Americans are more likely to be unemployed, and during economic downturns, their unemployment rates typically rise
faster.”
Kristin Powell, the principal of the Black to the Future Action Fund, expressed similar sentiments earlier this year.
She told Capital B that, in terms of campaigning, lingering overmuch on the strength of the economy — slowed inflation, low unemployment — when Black Americans’ everyday economic realities aren’t so rosy can be politically risky.
Black Americans “are concerned about low wages, about the cost of housing, about their pocketbooks,”
she said, adding that zooming in “only on how the economy is doing better than ever doesn’t match what people are actually feeling.”
Harris’ stop in Raleigh came about a week after the Black to the Future Action Fund released its nearly 60-page
economic agenda, based on a 2023 survey of more than 200,000 Black Americans in all 50 states.
It’s intended to be a road map that can inform elected officials on Black communities’ top economic concerns, which include some of the same themes that Harris tackled: boosting wages and worker protections, shrinking the costs of health care and education, expanding access to affordable housing.
“We have to start imagining what it is that we want and not be so afraid to break out of what is,” Alicia Garza, the founder of the Black to the Future Action Fund and its former principal,
said at a lunch event last week, echoing the kind of bold and forward-thinking vision that Harris is leaning into at her rallies.
Friday’s event was Harris’ eighth visit to the prized swing state this year. She leads former President Donald Trump in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, and the two are tied in Georgia, per a
Cook Political Report survey of seven battleground states that was released on Wednesday. Trump leads in Nevada.
Harris used her stop in the Tar Heel State to further distinguish herself from Trump.
“As for Donald Trump, well, he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which 45 million Americans rely on,” she said. “That would take us back to a time when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”
Right on cue, the crowd started chanting one of the campaign’s slogans: “We’re not going back.”
black2thefuture.org
The proposal is the vice president’s latest effort to sharpen her image ahead of the November election.
capitalbnews.org
