Talking Points: Inflation, the Economy and the Border
Inflation
(ALWAYS acknowledge the very real impact of inflation on people and ask them how it’s affecting them personally, but pivot to the story behind inflation and the Democrats’s ongoing support for working class people)
Top 3 talking points:
"Yes, honestly I'm hearing this at almost every door - people are really feeling pinched at the grocery store... you know, those big corporations increased prices during the pandemic with all of the material and supply chain issues, and now they're making record profits off of working folks like yourself/us because even after those issues subsided, the prices kept increasing.”
The Democrats are the party that has lowered drug prices (insulin capped at $35 with 10 more critical drugs this year coming down), supported unions for higher wages, and are advocating a return of the doubled child tax credit that helped lower childhood poverty by 40 percent while it was in force.
Democrats are in favor of policies that help working class people and their families. The Republicans continue to undercut the working class and focus instead on tax cuts for the wealthy and their donors while Trump is pushing for massive tariffs that economists say would be terrible for the economy. Trump’s proposed second round of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would end up giving the top 1 percent of earners an average of $70K while the tariffs on imported goods would effectively cost everyday households $4,000 a year.
Three top non-partisan analytic firms — Moody’s, Goldman Sachs and Penn Wharton have all praised Kamala Harris’s economic plan and called Donald Trump’s a disaster for the middle class, jobs and overall growth.
Trump’s tariffs — which are the heart of his plan along with tax cuts for the wealthy — amount to a $4,000 tax on middle class families and his overall plan would raise the debt nearly $6 trillion. While Harris’s plan is estimated to raise the debt $1.2 trillion it would actually be targeted to important needs such as the child tax credit and helping first time home buyers and making childcare affordable.
FURTHER POTENTIAL TALKING POINTS:
We KNOW about corporate price gouging, not just from their unprecedented profits and profit margins but from their own internal memos that show they had a strategy to capitalize on consumers’ expectations of rising prices.
Kamala Harris plans to address this price gouging by continuing President Biden’s most aggressive antitrust enforcement in decades. In August a Kroger exec admitted under oath during the administration’s antitrust suit against the company that Kroger engaged in price gouging on milk and eggs simply to pad their profits. Too many industries are now dominated by three or four competitors, making price collusion much more prevalent. Harris proposes propping up smaller businesses via subsidies to increase competition and lower prices.
The Harris policy is not price controls like Republicans say. It is designed to address specific emergency gouging such as was done —and is continuing — by colluding companies during the pandemic inflation. But the truth is there are already price controls – the ones being set by the four major egg producers and the four major grocery chains that have all come about due to mergers that Republicans have never tried to stop.
The overall economy:
Harris has been part of an administration that has overseen the greatest economic recovery in the world coming out of the pandemic and has enacted legislation that is rebuilding roads and bridges and supporting clean energy projects that have created 16 million jobs, including critically, one million in manufacturing.
Over the past year the US has had the lowest inflation rate among all the industrialized nations who have all struggled with inflation since the pandemic.
Here is a bottom-line values-based approach from David Haas’s recent blog post:
We believe that everyone ought to have the same opportunity to succeed, but our system has become rigged against hardworking Americans. Today, the children of rich people have a much better chance of succeeding than regular, hardworking Americans do, and that is unfair. We need to restore a level playing field that gives ordinary folks a chance to succeed, and to do that, we need to provide affordable childcare to give families a chance to get ahead.
The Border
Top Talking Point:
The Biden Harris administration compromised with Congressional Republicans this past spring to put together one of the toughest border deals in years to help slow down border crossings. This would have added thousands of immigration judges to process cases more quickly and would also have given the president the right to close down the border if the average apprehensions reached a certain level each month. Donald Trump told Republicans to scotch their own deal because he wanted the border for a political issue. The security of the border is too important for one of the candidates for president to be playing such blatant politics with it.
FURTHER POTENTIAL TALKING POINTS:
Kamala Harris was never the border czar but was charged with going to Central and South America to address root economic conditions there that are responsible for the tens of thousands of desperate people fleeing north. Without addressing root causes, such as climate change, economic conditions and violence we will never stop desperate people from trying to find better lives.
It is simply false to say borders were “opened” under Biden. Immigration laws must be enforced. But once Trump’s use of the Title 2 Law that closed the border during Covid was lifted — as Biden was legally required to after the pandemic no longer mandated it – there was a backlog at the border and the administration could not get additional funding from Congress to hire more administrators to process this backlog.
Trump’s plan via his Project 2025 program is mass deportatations on Day 1 that economists predict would be an economic disaster given the need for so many migrant workers in such key industries as agriculture, meat and dairy farming and meat processing.