Examining the economic policies of each 2024 presidential candidate: A breakdown

Mixing money and politics often leads to governmental policies that can directly affect your wallet. As the election season heats up, both candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, are beginning to elaborate on their potential economic policies once they take office. How will each candidate directly affect your bottom dollar?

Yahoo Finance Host Akiko Fujita is joined alongside Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman and Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul for Capitol Gains to discuss the current race for president, the difference between 2024 vs 2020 Kamala Harris, and the impacts each candidate has made so far. Later on, they are joined by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Reidl to give insight into the record national debt and take a deep dive into how each candidate may help or inflate the debt once they take office.

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Video Transcript

Welcome to Yahoo Finance's Capital Gains, a unique look at how us government policy affects your bottom line.

Long after the presidential election polls close.

I'm Akiko Fujita.

And today we're talking about the one thing neither candidate is talking about and that is the book looming national debt just past the critical milestone of $35 trillion.

We're going to be joined by Brian Riedel, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute later in the show.

But as always, we are kicking things off with my esteemed colleagues.

We've got the always opinionated Rick Newman and Ben Wo who's joining from my favorite city of Seattle today.

Um Guys, so 100 days out or less than 100 days out, I should say from the presidential election election day, we've seen a number of attack lines tested from the Republican side.

Now that we're about two weeks into Kamala harris' campaign.

There's sort of the usual name calling that we have come to see, but also the Republican side, the Trump side really pushing this narrative about what's been happening over at the border saying that Kamala Harris was in charge of this portfolio.

She is responsible.

Ben let's start with you.

I mean, how many of these attack lines are actually sticking?

Do you think Republicans have found kind of a winning message?

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

The effort to define Kamala Harris is underway.

11 thing that struck out to me is they, somebody watched two hours of Philadelphia television the other day and found 16 ads, um, ran in that period from Dems and Republicans.

100% of them were about Kamala Harris and 100% of the television experience.

Yeah, exactly.

Sounds like not the most fun time, but it's, yeah, yeah, 16 ads in that period.

All Kamala Harris focus and the Republican ones that you mentioned, what they're trying to do is define her as the borders are.

Uh we can fact check whether she was the borders.

Are we, we talked about this last week but that's, that's the line they want people to remember that, that, that she's, she's tied to the border and, and the order is, of course, one of the biggest issues of the campaign this year, Trump himself can, can go all over the map on this.

We saw that some of some of the headlines out of the National Association of Black Journalists conference yesterday.

Um He, he, he tries a bunch of different attack lines on that, but at least the border is what the party itself is trying to do.

So, one of the um lines of analysis I like that I've seen in a lot of the stuff I look at is that Kamala Harris started this campaign well known but not well defined.

And we're in a period now where Kamala Harris is battling to define herself against Donald Trump.

Camp Trump's campaign, which is trying to define her obviously in a totally different way.

And um I, I mean, when you look at what's happening in the polls and also in the betting markets, which are not accurate, but it gives you a sense of momentum.

Um Kamala Harris is building momentum and it has not stopped.

I'm not even sure it has slowed down yet.

So I follow the uh real clear politics, um aggregate of betting markets and Trump has um crashed.

I mean, his peak uh right around the time of the Republican convention was 66 6% election odds.

He's now down to 51% and Kamala Harris has rocketed up to 44%.

You know, Trump is still slightly ahead of her, but the gap is closing rapidly.

So you just wonder, are those lines gonna cross?

So Harris goes up and Trump goes below her or are they gonna plateau?

I mean, most analysts will say this is still, they're still giving Trump the odds um by maybe by a slight margin.

But um that, that narrative is changing rapidly.

So um this is just the Trump campaign is just starting to try to trash her as borders are, or California liberal so far, it doesn't seem to be sticking.

But you, you know, I think it might be too early to say what, what you see from Harris's camp and from the super pacs that are associated with her in terms of responding to this, the word they want people to know is prosecutor, which is what she was in California before she, before she rose to the Senate.

And so, so it's, it's an attempt to kind of cut against, as you're saying, Rick this, this, this focus on her as a, as a liberal and as the borders are talking about her time, the kind of law and order as the prosecutor when she, when she was in San Francisco, how do you think Kamala Harris wants to be defined?

I mean, Ben, you just said they're using the prosecutor line.

Voters may not know her as well as Donald Trump, but they can certainly pull from different threads in her past to see what she actually has stood for.

Does she want to be seen as an extension of the Biden Harris administration?

Or do voters go back to what she pushed for in her 2020 campaign to say?

Well, this is really what she's going to stand for.

Her answer to that.

Well, what she wants is the prosecutor line.

They want her to think of her as somebody that pushed back against liberals.

Um, that has this kind of law and order background, I think what's gonna, what's, what's gonna be a lot of focus on is her time as vice president.

That's the most recent thing.

There's a lot, that's, that's, that's in there that we can talk through.

That's interesting like that.

Um, the other element of it too that I think the Trump people want to focus on, especially is her 2020 run for, for the presidential.

She was, she tacked to the left on a lot of issues there.

She was Green New Deal, Medicare for all, all these different things that she was for then that are, that are liabilities now.

And by the way, she is, uh she is clearly backing away from a lot of those 2020 stances and when, when she first, but, you know, before Biden quit, but it looked like he was going to quit.

I was thinking to myself, wow.

Um if Kamala Harris ends up running as the ba basically progressive candidate, she ran as almost Bernie Sanders like candidate in 2020.

I, I I'm not seeing that as a great alternative to Trump and she's clearly not doing that.

So, um she has not said a single thing about the Green New Deal.

I mean, basically she signaled I'm with Biden on uh all the climate stuff, which means the um all the green energy incentives.

Let's stop talking about uh taking, you know, taking over the uh the automotive and the energy sectors.

Um also, she has, she has actually come out and said no, I no longer support a ban on fracking that is just an essential position.

Um for a lot of reasons, one of them is that fracking is big in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is a must win state for the Democrat.

She will not become president if she loses Pennsylvania.

And uh Fracking is popular in Pennsylvania.

We saw John Fetterman kind of flip flop on that when he, when he was running for Senator.

So she is very clearly positioning herself more as a moderate, you know, she want, she want, I think what she wants to do is she wants to extend um, her support of the Biden principles and the Biden policies that are popular but not the ones that are unpopular.

And, and, you know, I think it's a question of how effective she will be able to do that.

And I just want to go back once more to this thing about the borders are.

Um, the Harris campaign really needs to do a better job of making sure people know that um, encounters and crossings at the southwest border have plummeted um during the last couple of months.

And that's because Biden changed the policy.

Uh He made it a lot harder to apply for asylum and we now have border crossings that are sort of back to 2021 levels.

Um which is when the COVID restrictions were, I mean, border crossings have really drastically come down.

So she could, she could say I'm, the borders are and crossings are way down.

Let's talk about something that is, you know, close to the Yahoo finance audience, which is, of course, where the business community stands in all listen and we started to hear, um, some business leaders coming out in support of Kamala Harris.

Um, some, you know, Wall Street guys that we know like uh Ray Maguire over at, um, Lizard, uh, some, um, reports coming out from some for that, those like Jonathan Gray over at Blackstone is back, you know, she's backing her as well.

But the tech community conversation is a really interesting one, right?

Because she's from California.

This is somebody they're very familiar with.

Her brother in law is the chief legal officer at Uber.

She's got close ties there.

And yet Ben, we have seen this, what has become more of a public debate, especially among the V CS, Trump versus Harris.

How do you see this playing out?

Is it about policy or is it about the individuals?

I think it's a lot about the individuals and it's a storyline of the, of the campaign so far.

Trump made his first trip within the San Francisco city limits for in years last month to, to go to David Sachs's house and raise money.

He raised $12 million and that, that's pretty unprecedented in terms of, of Silicon Valley support for Trump.

There's still, you know, Biden.

Biden was still very strong in the valley.

And then Harris coming in, as you mentioned, she's got a lot of ties there.

She's got a lot of connections to the, to the sector.

I have a piece for Yahoo finance this weekend about how people really know her.

When you talk to people in the valley, they, they run into her.

They've, she's gone to their weddings.

She's come to all these things.

So she definitely scrambles a little bit and, and is kind of attempting to stop a lot of this, these, this, this growing support for Trump in the valley.

Ben, you've, you've done a lot of work on this.

Could you just, uh give us a sense for the universe of tech, bros for Trump?

I mean, who are the big ones who are the ringleaders here?

Uh David Sachs is the big one.

He, he's a venture capitalist.

He's part of the paypal mafia.

We can do that, which is, which is a big part of this.

He spoke at the Republican National Convention, as I mentioned, he, um, Donald Trump came to his house.

He's kind of the ringleader of this.

He's got a bunch of colleagues on it.

Um And what it's what's been interesting about it too is it's a fusion of folks like Sachs in the venture capital community and tech and crypto.

So it's this combination.

So what you saw at this event was Sachs's house, the Winkle eye twins were there.

A lot of, a lot of crypto guys were there too.

So it's bringing these two people together in support of Trump, which is still kind of a piece of Silicon Valley.

But it's, uh, it's an increasingly lucrative one for Trump and Elon Musk.

Obviously, Elon Musk, he's now no longer, you know, shitting out, shitting out election.

He's clearly putting his thumb on the scale on Trump's side and supposedly he's hot and cold on Trump.

It's interesting to see what is he today?

Do we know what he is today?

Who by the time people see this, it could be changing.

Here's my question to you though.

I mean, you know, we talk about this because these are people we cover right at Yahoo Finance at the end of the day though.

These are millionaires, billionaires who can give a big bump to Kamala Harris or uh former president Trump in terms of fundraising.

But like, does that move the needle at all in the end?

I mean, the average voter, do they even care about V CS who are backing either candidate?

Yeah, that, those are great questions, Akiko.

So I guess I'd say a couple of things.

First of all, uh there, there is also a large set of rich donors on Kamala harris' side, Mark Cuban and some others.

And Ben, you might know the name more of the names than I do.

You can fill us in on those it was 480 folks that were, there were, there was a, it was V CS for Harris and it was 480 names long the last I checked.

So it's a sizable group for sure.

So I, I mean, I think it's almost seems like maybe one group of these um, billionaire multimillionaires giving all this money, just sort of balances or cancels out the other.

But for people who are wondering, it actually is hard to buy elections in the United States as a donor.

And here, here's one of the reasons why, I mean, when you're, when you're giving multi millions of dollars, you can't give that generally to the, to the candidate's campaign that they can use for campaign activities.

Um There are limits on the amount you can donate and there are different kind of uh uh committees so that the, the limits are different, but the, the limits are well below a million dollars that, you know, an individual can don.

And, and, and in some instances, it's like around 3500 per, per individual so that those multimillions of donations, those go to Super pacs and Super pacs can do some things that are effective but they, they, it's not the campaign committee and it can't do.

There's a lot that they can't do.

So what they can do is they can run ads either for the candidate they favor or against the candidate they oppose.

But there are questions about, you know, the, the declining impact of ads when you've seen a million ads or whatever it was.

Ben, you just mentioned 16 ads in, you know, in a, in a single broadcast.

Um, you know, how, at what point does that ad make any difference or what does it make?

No difference?

So, I just, last thing I'll say, I, I, I've been covering this for a while and back in 2012, I think it was Shel Nadelson and his wife gave the most ever to super pacs.

It was over $100 million and that was supporting Mitt Romney Barack Obama won.

So the richest donors then as the, as today, the richest donors don't automatically get, get to decide who wins sacks and they're, they're very influential online sacks tweets every, every five minutes on his ex account.

His podcast is super influential.

So that, that I think that cuts against it a little bit that they, they could be reaching folks that aren't tuned into politics.

And that's, that's another big question we'll see in terms of their influence, not money though, that's not money, that's just activity but its influence to Ben's point.

Right.

Yeah, people, people are tuning in whatever platform they're using.

Um All right, Ben.

Enjoy your time in Seattle.

Say hi to everybody in the Northwest for me.

We're going to take a quick break here and Brian Riedel is going to be joining us on the other side, we'll be right back on capital gains.

Welcome back to capital gains.

Today, we're talking about the national debt.

Yes, $35 trillion is the number we're looking at right now and that number is growing and we're joined by Brian Riedel.

He's senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Brian has come out with some guidelines for actions Congress can take to avoid an impending debt crisis.

Brian, it's good to talk to you today.

Um This is an interesting conversation that we talk about a lot of Yahoo finance, but we haven't heard it on the campaign trail and Rick you and I have been talking about this because regardless of whether voters are paying attention or not, the next president will have to pay attention immediately because those tax cuts, Trump tax cuts are expiring, right?

This sounds like a boring my eyes glaze over type of topic.

But guess what?

When we write about this, we get tons of readers and tons of comments on these stories about the national debt.

So Brian, I'm glad you're here.

Um I want people to know they're all, there are a lot of reports on what we can do to deal with the $35 trillion national debt.

I like the one you just put out a few weeks ago.

It's on the website at the Manhattan Institute.

I like it because you anticipate you're, you're very schooled on uh the po political environment in Washington, you anticipate this is what the conservative response to this proposal is going to be.

This is what the liberal response is gonna be.

And then you sort of suggest a middle point.

So you start by saying, we don't have to, we don't have to uh pay off all $35 trillion.

All we need to do is get the debt down to about 100% of GDP.

So why don't you tell us how we do that?

You know the short version and we want people to read your paper later.

Sure, thank you.

Uh The debt has already risen from about 30% of GDP to 100% of GDP since 2008.

And it's on pace depending on interest rates to go as high as 250 to 300% of GDP over the next 30 years.

I'm not trying to balance the budget.

I'm just trying to keep the debt at about 100% of GDP, which would allow modest deficits.

Um But to do that, the first thing you have to do is set aside the easy answers, the partisan answers.

You're not gonna stabilize the debt by just getting rid of foreign aid, waste, fraud and abuse.

Ukraine funding or welfare.

On the other side of the spectrum, you're not gonna get rid of the debt uh or stabilize the debt by just taxing the rich or cutting defense.

Everything has to be on the table, all taxes, all spending.

But the place you have to start is Social Security and Medicare.

I know a lot of people don't wanna hear that but over the next 30 years, social security and Medicare systems face a cash shortfall of $124 trillion.

Let me repeat that.

Social security and Medicare face a 30 year shortfall of 100 and 24 trillion.

You cannot fix the debt without fundamentally reforming Social Security.

And so Brian, I wanna, I wanna jump in, I what do we do about social security and Medicare?

Well, for social security, uh I, you you my what my solution does.

And again, I'm trying to straddle conservative and liberal red lines in doing this, I'm trying to be politically realistic in this situation is I would first raise the eligibility age by two years, but I would do it gradually over the next 15.

Uh So a two year increase in the eligibility age from there, low income seniors would actually receive a slightly higher minimum benefit.

But new retirees that are earning more would see their benefits set at a pretty standard level of about $24,000 per year per retiree that grows with inflation.

So no more would people be retiring collecting 50 $60,000 in social security from day one?

But to cushion the blow, you would no longer pay Social Security payroll taxes starting at age 62 So if you have to keep working a little longer, you're not paying FICA taxes for social security.

After 62 Medicare is really hard.

Medicare faces an $87 trillion shortfall.

Over 30 years, I would convert to a premium support system where seniors choose among private health care plans that all offer a benefit, at least as generous as the current Medicare system.

Uh If you wanna choose a more expensive plan, you pay the difference out of pocket.

If you wanna choose a cheaper plan, you pocket the difference.

But all plans are still as generous as the current system.

The congressional budget office says this plan would save about 8% from Medicare without cutting benefits at all from there.

Increase Medicare part D and B premiums for wealthy seniors and you've stabilized much of Medicare brian.

I get back to that, that number that you just highlighted earlier.

The the debt ratio, the debt to GDP ratio, you say you want it at 100% and whatever that number is, does that ultimately mean whether it's Trump wanting to extend his tax cuts, whether Kamala Harris takes on what President Biden has pushed for, you know, keeping these tax cuts to those families that make $400,000 or less.

Can any of that be realized if you want to stay disciplined in the way that you say is necessary to stabilize the debt?

We need to find about $10 trillion in savings over the next decade relative to the baseline, about $10 trillion in tax hikes or spending cuts.

Now, Trump is already starting out with about $6 trillion in tax cuts.

Um extending the 2017 tax cuts, getting rid of taxes on social security benefits, the uh not taxing tips anymore.

So right there, you've just increased what you need from 10 trillion to 16 trillion.

He also said he won't touch Social security and Medicare, which is makes it mathematically impossible to stabilize the debt on the Democratic side, Kamala Harris and the Democrats also want to extend the tax cuts for all but the richest 5%.

But then they also want to get rid of the salt deduction cap and bring back the bigger child tax credit from that we saw during the pandemic.

So they would also cut taxes by about $5 trillion and not cut spending.

So the the reality is 10 trillion is hard enough.

Harris and Trump are probably going to push it up to 15 or 16 trillion right away.

We have our work cut out all this means Brian, we're gonna have to have you back on to crunch the numbers right post election regardless of who wins.

Brian Riall, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Thanks so much for joining, read that report, read that report at Manhattan Institute, read that report, Andre Ricks right up.

By the way on that report, I want to bring in Andrew Romano, he is national correspondent for Yahoo News.

Um Andrew, we've got a little time now for voters to start to kind of process who these two candidates are.

Have we started to see the needle move in a meaningful way, especially in those key swing states.

We have actually.

Um so I've been doing Yahoo News polls with Yougov for years now and very few things tend to move voters' opinions, people are pretty fixed um and settled on their political team.

But the emergence of Kamala Harris, the upheaval in the race does seem to have moved the needle.

So you mentioned the swing states, we're starting to see Kamala Harris catch up to Donald Trump in those states.

Now, Biden was back, he was falling after his disastrous debate performance back 34567 points in key swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, uh Kamala Harris in the latest round of polls and to caveat this, there haven't been that many polls yet.

Swing state polls take some time.

Uh It's hard to find a good sample of voters, but they've basically been showing her uh pulling ahead of Trump in the Rust Belt States, places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and closing the gap in the sunbelt states like Arizona and Georgia.

Um So she is back in this race when it looked like President Biden was uh was out.

Andrew.

Do you see any sign that uh harris' momentum is slowing, uh, or is it, has it, is it not slowing at all?

I mean, we sh we should also point out we're taping this as we, she has not yet said who her vice president is gonna be?

That could be a little bit of bump and we have not gotten to the Democratic convention either, which could be another bump.

So, is there more momentum ahead?

Yeah, I think she's enjoyed a pretty significant honeymoon.

Um There's been almost no negative news about Kamala Harris since she's jumped into the race.

I expect that to change before November.

But as you mentioned, she's going to pick a vice presidential nominee.

She's gonna have the convention in Chicago with Democrats.

Um One of the biggest things we've seen is a giant boost in Democratic enthusiasm.

So they, they asked this question, the Monmouth University poll back in February about Biden.

How enthusiastic were you about voting for him?

About 60% of Democrats said they were enthusiastic.

They asked the same question, a different pollster, the same question.

Uh just after Kamala Harris got into the race, that was over 80% I believe 82%.

So more even than Republicans being enthusiastic about Trump.

So the enthusiasm uh metric is back on equal ground with Republicans.

Democrats have rallied around Kamala Harris her favorable ratings that that actually has been the biggest shift.

You look at a chart of her favorable ratings and they essentially were uh somewhere pretty close to Biden.

So, uh so favorable approval down around 35 36 30 7% unfavorable up over 50%.

And then as soon as she gets into the race, it completely shifts.

It's just a straight line down for the uh for the unfavorables and a straight line up for the favorable.

So there's, you know, been a lot of enthusiasm and positivity around Harris.

I think that will continue with her vice presidential pick with the convention, which is of course, a four day info, infomercial for the candidate and the party.

Um So probably a few more good news cycles ahead for Harris before we get into the, the heat of the fall campaign.

All right, we'll be watching to see if that uh traditional bump comes through from the DNC, as we said, less than 100 days to go until election day.

Andrew.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Uh That does it for Rick and I on capital gains this week, we hope to see you back here again next week.