YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Harris-Style Freedom For The Working Class
(AP Photo/Juliana Yamada)
Plus, clean energy cleans up, immigration reform becomes a family matter, and plastic bags get sacked.
by Jean Yi
Progressive Policy For The Working Class
Kamala Harris announced a slate of progressive economic policy proposals before and during the Democratic National Committee. Many of these proposals are continuations of temporary measures enacted by Democrats during the first two years of Biden’s term, when the party controlled Congress.
For instance, Harris called for permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit to $3,600, which the American Rescue Plan established for one year in 2021, versus the current limit of $2,000. That pandemic-era Child Tax Credit expansion temporarily lifted almost 3 million children out of poverty, reducing the child poverty rate by 35 percent.
To help pay for these efforts, Harris proposed $5 trillion in tax increases on corporations and high-income Americans, including raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. During the convention, Harris also called for a middle-class tax cut, without specifying details.
On housing, Harris proposed banning AI software from dictating rent costs. San Francisco became the first place to institute such a ban earlier this month, and the Justice Department just filed suit against real-estate software company RealPage over allegedly using algorithms to fix rent prices. Harris also suggested offering $25,000 in down payment assistance and a $10,000 tax credit to first-time homeowners, which could make homeownership more affordable and accessible — although some critics have said the proposal could end up increasing housing prices by increasing demand.
Harris also called for canceling medical debt for millions of Americans, although she didn’t specify how much debt would be eliminated. As Vice President, Harris led efforts to keep medical debt under $500 off credit reports, and she worked with the state of North Carolina on a pilot project to forgive medical debt for two million state residents. Finally, Harris called for capping the price of insulin to $35 per month and limiting the total cost of prescription drugs to $2,000 annually for all Americans, instead of just those on Medicare.
Clean Energy Blows Up
The Inflation Reduction Act, a large spending package targeting clean energy, taxes, and healthcare, among other issues, turned two years old on Aug. 16 — and data suggests the sweeping legislation is delivering massive clean-energy investments.
While the act is projected to cost about $1 trillion over 10 years to fund programs like tax rebates, grants, and subsidies, researchers have found that the law has so far spurred anywhere from $126 billion to $493 billion in increased clean energy investments from businesses and individuals. These reports also found that the act has led to 100,000 to 300,000 additional clean-energy jobs.
While primarily a climate change law, the act also includes important provisions related to healthcare and taxes. For instance, the act extended federal subsidies until 2025 for people who are buying individual health insurance plans on marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act, slashing the cost of annual premiums by 44 percent. It also lowered the prices of some drugs by setting price caps and allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug manufacturers for the first time ever.
The Inflation Reduction Act also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service, allowing the agency to increase tax-law enforcement. The act also imposed a new corporate minimum tax on corporations with an average annual income of over $1 billion — a tax boost that is poised to raise more than $220 billion in 10 years.
Immigration Reform Is All In The Family
The Biden administration began accepting applications for a new immigration program that would put the undocumented spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens on a path to citizenship. The program, announced last June, provides green cards and three-year work permits to these individuals without making them leave the country if they entered without authorization.
Called Keeping Families Together, the program provides a type of legal relief called “parole in place” that protects people from deportation. About 500,000 spouses and 50,000 of their children under the age of 21 are expected to qualify for the program. Applicants must have been married to a U.S. citizen prior to the program’s announcement on June 17 and living continuously in the United States for at least 10 years.
While many of these people would have already qualified for a path to citizenship through marriages to U.S. citizens, most did not apply because of a Clinton-era immigration law that would have required them to leave the country for years after filing for a green card, if they had been present in the country unlawfully.
In 2012, Obama started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which prevented deportation proceedings for more than 800,000 undocumented people, often referred to as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the U.S. as children. The program has been in legal limbo since Trump tried to end it in 2017. But alongside the Keeping Families Together program, Biden announced an initiative last June to support work visas for some Dreamers with college degrees — the most significant relief offered to the group in years.
HAPPILY LEVER AFTER: Life Is Plastic (It’s Not Fantastic)
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison ordered Walmart and Reynolds Consumer Products to stop selling certain types of plastic bags in the state for two and a half years after finding that the companies inaccurately labeled the bags as recyclable.
At the end of the moratorium, Walmart and Reynolds will be allowed to continue selling the bags — 13-, 30-, and 33-gallon trash bags sold under the Hefty and Walmart Great Value brands — as long as they are labeled as non-recyclable. The companies were also ordered to pay more than $200,000 for violating state statutes concerning false advertising claims. Finally, the companies must establish a process for reviewing marketing claims and train their marketing team about greenwashing.
Less than 10 percent of the world’s plastic waste ends up recycled. What’s more, the vast majority of plastic waste sent out for recycling actually ends up getting burned in incinerators and sent to landfills in the U.S. and overseas, causing pollution and harmful health effects.
The number of plastics-related lawsuits has been increasing over the last decade due to a new legal strategy that hinges on the idea that the industry knew plastics recycling was not viable in the long term, yet continued to claim their products were recyclable. A similar legal approach has been successfully used against opioid manufacturers and tobacco companies and is now being implemented in climate-justice cases.