A Trumper in the family points the finger at Biden and Harris

Political leaders campaign in poetry, govern in prose, the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo famously said. After Kamala Harris’s uplifting and extraordinary speech, perhaps a close, hard look at a few things is in order.

A sister of mine who supports Donald J. Trump argued that the Biden-Harris administration is responsible for major problems in recent years. So, she asked that I share information with her on a few biggies.

Since this space, I hope, is one for some clarity, sharing the word more broadly might be useful. For now, let’s look at just three of her issues: border security, taxes and inflation.

1) Biden is to blame, she says, for OPEN BORDERS

Let’s start with an emergency proclamation of last June, when Biden blocked many crossings on the southern border. Homeland Security officials reported that over the following six weeks, the number of border patrol encounters with migrants had plunged by more than 50% thanks to the measure, cutting the seven-day average to below 1,900 a day. DHS also removed and returned more than 50,000 individuals to more than 100 countries.

“Crossings dropped sharply this spring and summer after the Biden administration tightened border controls and closed off migrants’ access to the asylum system,” The Washington Post reported. “Still, apprehensions exceeded 1.3 million during the first nine months of the 2024 fiscal year.”

Biden issued that proclamation because a few months earlier, in February, Republicans in Washington killed a border security bill that would have gone far toward solving the problems. The bill, backed by Biden, was crafted over many months by one of the most conservative GOP officials in Washington, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, by Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and by independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a place very much affected by crossings.

 As Lankford described it, the bill would have provided funds to build a wall, increase technology at the border, and add more detention beds, more agents, and more deportation flights. It would have ended what Lankford called the abuse of a system that waived in over a million people. And he said it would have dramatically changed ambiguous asylum laws by conducting fast screenings at a higher standard of evidence, limited appeals, and fast deportation.

For its part, the American Immigration Council called the measure “the most sweeping immigration bill of the twenty-first century.” It would have overhauled the asylum-seeking process—and imposed an ‘emergency authority’ that would leave asylum fully out of reach for those crossing between ports of entry for much of the next three years, according to the group. It would have attempted to address issues like work permits and years-long waits for asylum-seekers, and also raised the initial standard a person must pass to access our asylum system.

So, in other words, it would have done most of what GOP leaders wanted done. “I honestly believe that exact bill would have passed in December, but by the time it got into February, it became immediately the major focus in the election, because, as you recall, the Republican primary suddenly got resolved,” Lankford said. “It looked very obvious that President Trump was going to be there, and everything collapsed at that point. If that bill would have gone in December, I think it would have passed.”

What happened? Trump weighed in and told his allies in the Senate and the House to kill the bill. Why? He felt more chaos at the border would help him win reelection.

“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” said GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. “But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president not to try and get the problem solved. as opposed to saying, ‘hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”

Trump’s backers in Washington, fearing his wrath and punishment by his followers, did his bidding. They gave him an issue on which he has pounded the Biden-Harris administration ever since, one that could have been largely resolved without his interference.

Now, with the help of a BBC summary and other sources, let’s look back a bit to see how the illegal crossings rose to top 2 million in 2022, more than double that of some prior years. Did Biden, in fact, do nothing while the chaos reigned?

First, from Biden’s first days in office in January 2021 until May 2023, the administration expelled more than two million migrants under a public health measure, Title 42. Trump had first used the law beginning in March 2020 to expel nearly 400,000 in this Covid-inspired action.

Earlier, Trump had also imposed a “zero-tolerance” policy of separating children from their parents and deporting the adults. Between 3,900 and more than 5,000 children were separated from their parents between 2017 and 2021, an effort that perhaps only the most callous Trump supporter could accept. Recall the cages?

When Biden came in, he sought to fix that inhumane policy. However, undoing the cruel damage has proved problematic because of sloppy record-keeping by the Trump administration. Some children have remained stranded. As of the latest accounting, in April 2024, nearly 1,400 children were still waiting.

So there’s no question that border crossings climbed during Biden’s time in office. Still, while he tried to work with GOP officials, he was stymied. For his part, did Trump eliminate crossings, even as he caged children to accomplish that? Nope.

But did Biden and allies in the Congress make efforts to curtail the crossings? Yup. But the biggest of those moves was shot down by Trump in an extraordinarily self-serving election-manipulating way.

Now, might we expect Harris to make efforts similar to Biden’s on the border? As she said in her acceptance speech, Harris promises to bring the Lankford-Murphy-Sinema bill back. Certainly, if Trump loses and his hold on the GOP slips, such a bill could be a slam-dunk.

2) Our current president RAISES TAXES, my sib says, suggesting Harris would, too

As he sought to boost some spending for needed measures like the $108 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, Biden has needed revenue. But he pledged to avoid hiking taxes on any families making less than $400,000 a year. Harris is sticking with that approach, even as she — like Biden — tries to implement some changes. She wants to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, as The New York Times reported.

The most recent White House budget, a Biden plan that Harris supported, includes proposals to raise taxes on large corporations. Chief among them is raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%.

For wealthy individuals, Harris would set the top marginal income rate at 39.6%, up from 37%. On top of that, she would also increase the rate on two parallel Medicare surtaxes to 5% from 3.8% for Americans making more than $400,000 and expand the income subject to one of them. Together, the Medicare and income proposals would create a top marginal rate as high as 44.6%

Moreover, the wealthy would see changes in how gains on investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets are taxed, the Times reported. For Americans making more than $1 million a year, investment earnings would be taxed at the same rate as regular income, instead of at the lower rates for capital gains.

On the benefit side, Harris is also suggesting giving tax incentives to builders to make starter homes that would be sold to first-time buyers. As Times economics writer Peter Coy describes them, these would boost the supply of housing. So, too, would her proposed $40 billion innovation fund to “empower local governments to fund local solutions to build housing.”

More homes are badly needed after years of insufficient construction, Coy writes. He quotes Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, who stated in June: “The simple fact is there are not enough homes in this country, and that’s pushing homeownership out of reach for too many families,”

Coy is less keen on Harris’s plan to help first-time buyers to become homeowners by giving them up to $25,000 each toward a down payment. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” the writer suggests. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

For my part, I’m reminded of the G.I. Bill, the postwar measure that veterans used to buy houses. Between 1944 and 1955, veterans used the bill to take out 4.3 million federally guaranteed low-interest home loans with a total face value of $33 billion. They were responsible for 20% of all new homes built in that period, including massive developments such as the Levittowns. Perhaps that would be a more sensible approach.

Still, Coy is even less enthused about Trump’s plans. “The Harris-Walz agenda for the economy is much better than Donald Trump’s,” he writes. “Trump wants to extend all of the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including those benefiting the wealthiest Americans. For years he called for repealing the Affordable Care Act, although lately he has said he’ll keep it unless he can come up with something better and less expensive. His plan for across-the-board tariffs would raise prices for all kinds of imported goods.”

3) Biden caused INFLATION, she suggests

My sib blames Biden for the inflation that has wracked our economy, echoing a common refrain from Trump. There’s no doubt that there has been a lot of it, even though the rate of price hikes has been coming down. The 7% annual rate in 2021 slipped to 6.5% in 2022, to 3.4% in 2023 and to an annualized 2.9% so far in 2024. And that compares to rates of between 1.4% and 2.3% during the Trump years.

But is Biden to blame? Does Trump share culpability?

First, the surge in prices began in the wake of the Covid epidemic, when economies shook off their recessions. Higher demand for all sorts of goods drove up prices — a far more potent effect than any presidential effort could have.

Earlier, Trump in 2020 engineered the Cares Act and Biden in the following year pushed the American Rescue Plan – both of which were designed to keep recession at bay and to keep Americans working and spending. The measures, together with others, pumped some $5 trillion into the economy. The influx was, at worst, a contributing part.

“These programs contributed to strong consumer and business demand, which tightened labor markets (between mid-2021 and early 2022 the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers doubled), putting upward pressure on wages and prices,” economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research reported.

Yes, together with the post-Covid global economic resurgence, such actions abetted inflation. But they also kept a recession, which lasted from February until April 2020, from becoming a depression. And they also helped lower unemployment from its Trump-term high of 14.8% in April 2020 to the current 4.3% (after it dipped to a record 3.4% in January and April 2023.

So, could Biden have done more to combat inflation? Probably not.

In fact, presidents don’t control inflation. That job falls to the independent Federal Reserve, which controls interest rates and thus tries to cap inflation. The Fed tries to balance employment and other markers of economic health with the price increases that normally come from a hot economy – if we have too much employment, for instance, we get more inflation; if we have too little employment, we have recession.

As experts have long observed, presidents get way too much credit for good economies and too much blame for bad ones. But they can do a lot of harm. Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on foreign goods, for instance, is sure to stoke inflation, as would his suggested efforts at pressuring the Fed to reduce interest rates.

I hope my sister finds some of the information here helpful. Other issues that she raised — some spoken to by Harris — will be worth a look in the future, too. So, stay tuned.