(AFP) – Donald Trump will tear into the Biden administration’s economic record Wednesday, just days before Kamala Harris unveils her plan for tackling living costs in her first major policy speech as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Trump’s campaign said he would deliver remarks in the city of Asheville, in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina, on the “economic hardships created by the Harris-Biden administration.”
“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Working families are having to spend 30 percent more for baby food, and the price of gasoline is up 50 percent. America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies.” Consumer inflation is one of the biggest issues of the campaign, but new government figures out Wednesday showed it easing to an annual 2.9 percent in July — its lowest since March 2021 — cheering those calling for a cut in interest rates. “At this point, the inflationary pressure that we saw build has really been dissipated significantly,” Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, told CNBC, noting a “broad expectation that the worst is easily behind us.”
Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket last month and has since been riding a tidal wave of enthusiasm, speaking to packed arenas and eclipsing Trump’s polling leads — leaving the Republican scrambling to reset. Marginally more Americans trust her to handle the economy than Trump, according to a University of Michigan poll, and Harris leads or ties her opponent in every battleground state except Nevada, according to the influential Cook Political Report. “Harris’s success in closing the gap is driven by her consolidation of the Democratic base and increased support among independent voters,” Cook analyst Amy Walter wrote.
But Harris has yet to settle on a concrete plan for governing, instead framing the campaign in the broadest of strokes as a “fight for the future,” as Republicans pressure her to sit for media interviews and talk policy. She is due to roll out a much-anticipated plan Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina, to lower costs of health care, housing, and groceries for middle-class families and take on corporate price gouging. But Trump hopes to upstage her by arriving first in a state where he says residents are struggling to afford health care following a 21 percent rise in prices over Biden’s term. “This is why President Trump has promised to not cut a single penny from Social Security or Medicare and why he has always pledged to protect these imperative benefits to America’s seniors,” the campaign said.
During his presidency, Trump released four successive annual budgets that proposed cutting Medicare, a federal health insurance program for seniors. Experts disagree on how much those cuts would have hurt beneficiaries had they been enacted. Trump told reporters last week he didn’t plan to hold swing state campaign events until after next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But Republicans have been pressuring him to do more to show he can keep up with Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, who have attracted blockbuster crowds to their events.
Asheville is part of a series of planned campaign stops themed around specific topics and will be followed Saturday by an event focusing on consumer prices, crime, and immigration in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Trump won his narrowest victory in North Carolina in his losing 2020 campaign, and it is considered one of the handful of swing states that tend to decide US elections.
– Peter Zay with Frankie Taggart in Washington
© 2024 AFP
