Trump and Harris Embody a Stark Partisan Divide on Fighting Poverty
The New York Times
The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rates down, but their approaches could hardly be more different.
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The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans.
As the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 threatened to decimate the economy, Mr. Trump signed a large stimulus package that included substantial aid for the poor. When President Biden and Ms. Harris took office in 2021, their administration pushed more big aid expansions through Congress as part of their pandemic-recovery plan, driving the poverty rate still lower.
But if the two candidates’ responses to that extraordinary period had elements in common, the lessons they took from it were very different.
In the pandemic-era programs, now mostly expired or reduced, Ms. Harris and other Democrats found reinforcement of their faith in the government’s power to ameliorate hardship. If elected, she would seek to sustain or expand many of them, including subsidies for food, health care and housing, and revive a change to the child tax credit that essentially created a guaranteed income for families with children. Those policies helped temporarily cut the poverty rate by more than half from prepandemic levels.
She backs a $15 federal minimum wage, which Republicans have fought, and is a vocal supporter of programs like subsidized child care and paid family leave meant to help balance work and family.
