Where Vice President Kamala Harris stands on key issues

NEW YORK – With Election Day 2024 quickly approaching, we’re taking a look at what voters should know about the presidential candidates’ stances on key issues.

JUMP TO: ECONOMY l IMMIGRATION l ABORTION l HOUSING

Polls show a razor-thin margin in the presidential race between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But where does each candidate stand on several important issues, including the economy, immigration, abortion and housing?

Here’s where the vice president stands on the key topics:

Harris announced a set of economic proposals that included building homes, cutting taxes, and lowering the cost of groceries, and other basic needs for people.

With the issue of housing costs affecting the nation, the vice president debuted a new ad amplifying her plan to build 3 million new homes over four years to manage inflationary pressures. 

Harris is also proposing the government provide $25,000 in assistance to first-time homebuyers. 

According to the Associated Press, the vice president’s plan would establish tax breaks for homebuilders focused on first-time buyers and expand existing incentives for companies that construct rental housing.

The AP reported that with local zoning limiting the supply of houses, Harris would double the available funding to $40 billion to encourage local governments to remove the regulations that prevent extra construction.

Inflation

The vice president promoted a plan for a federal ban on price gouging by food producers and grocery stores. She touted this as part of her overall economic policy, to ease inflation and lower the cost of living during a North Carolina rally on Aug.16.

Harris’ grocery pricing proposal would instruct the Federal Trade Commission to penalize “big corporations” involved in price spikes, and it singles out a lack of competition in the meat-packing industry for driving up meat prices.

Consumer prices rose just 2.4% in September from a year earlier, down from 2.5% in August, and the smallest annual rise since February 2021. Measured from month to month, prices increased 0.2% from August to September, the Labor Department reported Thursday, the same as in the previous month.

Wages

Harris called for raising the minimum wage in a Las Vegas speech in early August, but her campaign has not specified how high she believes it should be raised.

The vice president promised to work to eliminate taxes on tips paid to restaurant and other service industry employees, like Trump has.

Harris’ campaign told the Associated Press that if she is elected president, she would work with Congress to draft a proposal that includes an income limit and other terms to keep hedge fund managers and lawyers from structuring their compensation to try to take advantage of the policy. Harris also would push for the proposal alongside one to increase the federal minimum wage.

Taxes 

Harris is pledging tax cuts for more than 100 million working and middle-class households. She will do this by restoring two tax cuts designed to help middle-class and working Americans: the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, per Harris’ campaign website. 

The vice president wants to make the Child Tax Credit permanent. This would give families as much as $3,600 per child and offer a special $6,000 tax credit for new parents. Harris says her administration would expand tax credits for first-time homebuyers and push to build 3 million new housing units in four years, while wiping out taxes on tips and endorsing tax breaks for entrepreneurs.

According to the AP, Harris also wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% and the corporate minimum tax to 21%. The current corporate rate is 21% and the corporate minimum, raised under the Inflation Reduction Act, is at 15% for companies making more than $1 billion a year. But Harris would not increase the capital gains tax as much as President Joe Biden had proposed on investors with more than $1 million in income.

Social Security

If lawmakers don’t want millions of Americans to see their benefits automatically cut by 17% in 11 years, there are essentially two options: pay more or get less. 

Since becoming the nominee, Harris hasn’t laid out a plan to address Social Security, but Democrats have proposed raising Social Security taxes on the wealthiest Americans to cover the gap. 

Americans pay Social Security taxes on incomes up to $168,000 a year; anything earned above that amount is not subject to Social Security taxes.

A House proposal – the one Harris said she supported in March 2023 – would only raise Social Security taxes for those making above $400,000 a year.

As a senator, she supported a similar measure under the Social Security Expansion Act, but that act calls for raising Social Security taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year.

The Social Security Expansion Act that Harris backed would also change the way Social Security benefits are calculated. Currently, cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) are based on the CPI-W, which tracks monthly price changes in goods and services for urban wage earners and clerical workers.

Lawmakers have proposed using the CPI-E, which measures price changes based on the spending patterns of Americans who are 62 years and older. Democrats say it would increase benefits for millions of older Americans and give a more accurate picture of how seniors spend their money, weighing more on things like prescription drug costs. 

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare endorsed Harris for president in a July 24 blog post.  

“As Vice President, she has championed the administration’s policies on behalf of older Americans — including strengthening Social Security and Medicare and lowering prescription drug prices for seniors,” the committee said on its website. 

Harris has not given many specifics as to how she plans to tackle the border crisis.

She previously promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.

During the Democratic National Convention, Harris said she would promote the bill again.

“As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” she said. “I know — I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.”

Harris also wants a faster track for young immigrants living in the country illegally who arrived as children.

The border bill represented one of the most conservative and comprehensive proposals in decades to emerge from a bipartisan negotiation in Congress. It would seek to tamp down the historic number of illegal border crossings by making the asylum process tougher and faster.

Presidential administrations would also be given the authority to deny migrants from claiming asylum at the border if the number of migrants claiming asylum becomes unmanageable for authorities.

How Harris sees the border crisis

Harris took several progressive stances on immigration when she sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. She wanted immigrants who were in the country illegally to be eligible for government healthcare, and she wanted to decriminalize border crossings.

When Harris became Biden’s vice president, the administration unraveled some of Trump’s harshest immigration policies, and Harris worked on improving conditions in Central American countries to reduce the flow of migrants toward the United States. However, illegal crossings reached historic levels, creating a political crisis for the White House. Republicans have blamed Harris for failing to secure the border.

The vice president has made abortion rights a cornerstone of her campaign and called on Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, a right that stood for nearly 50 years before being overturned by the Supreme Court.

Like Biden, Harris has criticized bans on abortion in Republican-controlled states and promised as president to block any potential nationwide ban should one clear a future GOP-run Congress.

Harris was the Democrats’ most visible champion of abortion rights even while Biden was still in the race. She has promoted the administration’s efforts short of federal law — including steps to protect women who travel to access the procedure and limit how law enforcement collects medical records.

Harris’ campaign has highlighted three key aspects of housing policy that she hopes to enact. Broadly, LendingTree said these policies aim to lower housing costs while increasing housing supply.

Build 3 million housing units over the next 4 years

Harris has proposed building 3 million housing units over the next four years. There are currently no specifics on where these homes would be built and whether the units would be in addition to the construction already poised to take place. The Harris administration has also proposed “the first-ever tax incentive for homebuilders who build starter homes sold to first-time homebuyers.” Details of this tax incentive are unclear, but it could help builders more easily tackle the costs associated with new construction.

Lower rents by enforcing stricter regulations on large corporate landlords

A Harris administration would ask Congress to pass two laws — the Stop Predatory Investing Act and the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act. The Stop Predatory Investing Act would deny interest and depreciation tax deductions for taxpayers who own 50 or more single-family properties. Meanwhile, the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act aims to make it illegal for landlords to use rent price data shared with them by third parties to help them increase rents.

Give first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 to put toward a down payment on a home

According to the Harris campaign, the new administration would “provide working families who have paid their rent on time for two years and are buying their first home up to $25,000 in down payment assistance.” While the campaign doesn’t specify the form in which the assistance would come, similar proposals tend to allocate the aid as a grant.

The FOX Digital Team, as well as the Associated Press, helped contribute to this report.