CNN’s Dana Bash joked that you could play “a drinking game” every time Vice President Kamala Harris returns to her same talking points on the economy.
“When you listen to Kamala Harris on what she will do, you can almost start a drinking game every time she says ‘small businesses’,'” Bash told a CNN panel on Wednesday.
Bash played a clip of Harris speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Philadelphia on Tuesday about her economic plan, where Harris reiterated her proposal to expand the tax credit for new small business owners from $5,000 to $50,000.
“She also talks about being a middle-class kid. That’s also the front of her answers,” Semafor reporter David Weigel told Bash, as another example of her repeating talking points.
HARRIS SERVES UP WORD SALAD IN DC SPEECH: ‘THE CHILDREN OF THE COMMUNITY ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE COMMUNITY’
Weigel suggested Harris leans on her rhetoric because she doesn’t “have an answer” to voters’ most pressing concerns about prices.
“If you look at the interviews they’ve been doing in local media, and they’ve opened up a bit more since the debate, the first question is often, ‘what are you going to do to lower prices?’ Which is a very hard question for an incumbent party to answer. And it has implications that are very Trumpian,” he continued. “It is: Trump says he’s going to do mass deportation, that’ll decrease demand. Trump says he’ll explore more energy, that’ll decrease energy costs.”
“Democrats can point to the fact that inflation is actually- it was bad two years ago. It’s not now,” Weigel said. “What people want to hear is how do you make the prices go down? So everything she says is something realistic that could survive a fact check that answers a very hard question.”
“There is not a plan to say that we’re going to lower the cost of your grocery bill to what it was in 2019. There was a pandemic. There was money supply inflation. You can’t hit the button that makes that go away. But Trump has an answer that gets them through these questions. And Harris, I think, with a different set of incentives and a different relationship to something she can back up in a policy paper, she doesn’t have an answer. So she goes to a larger, well, imagine a future where there are more businesses and this starts to ameliorate,” he continued.
HILLARY CLINTON SAYS IT’S A ‘DOUBLE STANDARD’ TO ASK HARRIS ABOUT HER POLICIES
During her first solo TV interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris gave a lengthy response about her “middle-class” upbringing when asked what “specific” plans she has to bring down prices for Americans.
She concluded her answer by bringing up her plan to expand the tax credit for new small business owners.
Harris has proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from the current 21%.
Her campaign also reportedly told Marc Goldwein, vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, that it supports all tax increases on high earners proposed by President Biden for the 2025 fiscal year.
During an address Wednesday at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Harris provided few specific details about the policies she would enact as president.
At one point, Harris spoke about providing families with the necessary resources so that parents can “raise their children well,” though she did not say what resources or how they would be provided.
“I grew up understanding the children of the community are the children of the community, and we should all have a vested interest in ensuring that children can go grow up with the resources that they need to achieve their God-given potential,” the VP said.
Harris also appeared to undercut her own proposed policy to institute a federal price-fixing plan for corporations, telling the crowd that “very few” corporations actually “jack up prices” for consumers in emergencies.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace and Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.
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