Kamala Harris seeks to cap child care costs at 7% for working families

By Hadriana Lowenkron and Skylar Woodhouse
 

Vice President Kamala Harris said that she would seek to cap child care costs for working families at 7% of their income, her latest effort to assure voters that she will address the high prices and broad economic anxiety that has threatened her bid for the White House against Republican Donald Trump.
 

“My plan is that no family, no working family, should pay more than 7 per cent of their income in child care,” Harris said Tuesday at an event in Philadelphia with the National Association of Black Journalists. 

It’s the first time Harris has publicly spoken about the initiative in her campaign. President Joe Biden, who she replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket, previously proposed it. The 7 per cent cap was first proposed in the Build Back Better package in 2021.

 

Harris on Tuesday touted child care as a priority for the US economy, saying that “when you talk about the return on that investment, allowing people to work, allowing people to pursue their dreams in terms of how they want to work, where they want to work, benefits us all.”

“It’s sadly the state of affairs in our country that working people often have to decide to either be able to work or be able to have child care,” Harris said.

The vice president also said more needed to be done to raise wages for child care and home health providers “in terms of ensuring that they receive the wages that they deserve based on the dignity of their work.”

The economy is the election’s defining issue, with both Harris and Trump unveiling proposals aimed at addressing voter frustration over high prices. The vice president has proposed a litany of measures, including plans to increase the small business tax deduction for startup costs to $50,000 from $5,000, offering down-payment assistance of $25,000 to aid first-time homebuyers and initiatives to curb the cost of rent and groceries.

Like Trump, she supports eliminating taxes on tips, and has vowed to end subminimum wages for tipped workers, a situation in which employers pay less than the minimum wage with the expectation that employees will make up for the difference with gratuities.

She has also called for a 28 per cent capital gains tax rate on people earning $1 million or more and for raising the corporate tax rate to 28 per cent from 21 per cent. Her campaign has said revenue from those tax increases could help offset the cost of her agenda.

Trump is vowing to renew tax cuts from his signature 2017 law that are slated to expire next year and is calling for reducing the corporate tax rate even further — to 15 per cent. He’s denounced Harris’ programmes as “communist” price controls.

2024 reset
 

Harris spoke two days after Trump was targeted in a second failed assassination attempt — an incident that he has sought to blame on Harris and Biden, claiming without offering any proof, that “highly inflammatory” political rhetoric inspired the gunman.

The incident — the latest dramatic development in an already volatile and unprecedented race — offers to give Trump fresh momentum for a campaign that has largely been on the backfoot since Harris’ entry into the race. Polls show a tight contest between the two in the swing state that will determine November’s election.

Harris returned to Philadelphia on Tuesday — just a week after she took the stage in the same city against Trump for their only scheduled debate so far. Post-debate surveys found voters saw Harris as the forum’s winner and breaking toward the Democrat after a poor performance from Trump that included him promoting unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

“My heart breaks for this community,” Harris said Tuesday in response to a question about Springfield, Ohio.

“When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big there is a profound amount of responsibility that comes with that,” Harris said without mentioning Trump directly. “Especially when you have been, and then seek to be, again, President of the United States of America.”

Tuesday’s setting with the NABJ follows Trump’s own sitdown with journalists from the group in July – a contentious affair in which he clashed with the moderators on stage and fumbled his own efforts to court Black voters by questioning the racial identity of Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.