I will close this month and begin the next with a political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. This is a blackbox analysis. Meaning, I’m not concerning myself here with any other issues that might affect how one should vote; I’m just going to pretend none of that exists, and that the competing candidates are the same except for their policy platforms. That’s wildly not true. But I want to focus on that one issue, since it tends to get washed under the flood of so many other important things rightly being covered elsewhere.

Methodology

So the question I am asking today is, who is offering the better platform?

Apart from the fact that Donald Trump is a liar, a felon, a racist, a bribery-accepting profiteer, a lunatic in documented mental decline, a shockingly incompetent businessman, objectively one of the worst presidents in recent memory, a probable rapist, and a multiply-indicted criminal and insurrectionist, who has threatened to weaponize the legal system against his political opponents and destroy the protections our democracy depends upon, and who has already been granted authority to commit crimes by the Supreme Court and who will likely appoint even more anti-constitutional fascists to that and other courts, and whose most singular achievement (that he has said he will maintain or even advance) was taking away American reproductive rights (effectively violating the Constitution’s ninth and fourteenth amendments)—you know, apart from all that—how does his policy platform compare with that of Kamala Harris? Harris doesn’t need to be perfect to perform better than Trump on all those other metrics (from honesty to appointing judges), so there is no need to take any of that into account here (citizens can take it into account at the ballot box). Here we will bracket all that away, and simply weigh her platform against his.

For the purposes of this analysis I will set aside the fact that Trump is such a ubiquitous liar that we actually can’t trust anything he “says” is his policy to be anything he will actually do, because he is incompetent and insane and changes his mind at random. He also often says things just to be popular that he never really believes or intends to follow up on. A naysayer might make the same accusation against Harris, but that would just bring us back to ceteris paribus. There is better evidence that Harris actually intends to try to do the things she wants than that Trump will, but even if we assumed they were equal on that score, then they are back equal on policy metrics: for every policy you might claim Harris is shining us on about and really will drop, we could say the same of Trump, and so neither of them outscores the other there.

Instead, I will pretend none of that exists, and look at what Trump has claimed he will do in terms of policy, and pretend he will actually give it a shot. Harris we can trust will actually at least try to implement what she says. We all know a Republican congress will sandbag her and try to prevent any of it from happening (just like they did with Obama and, indeed, Biden), or try to break it if it does happen so they can disingenuously claim it doesn’t work. But that’s on them. Here what I mean to do is evaluate Harris’s platform, not the GOP’s promise to destroy it. Which, of course, we could prevent by kicking all those bums out; but that’s not the issue we’re examining today. Today, the question is, if Trump and Harris could succeed at what they claim they want to do, which will produce an outcome better for America?

This analysis will also follow a couple of additional rules:

• Vague promises devoid of any described policy will not be counted. In other words, if they claim they will do something, but not how they will do it, then they are not presenting us a policy at all, but just an “attitude,” which tells us nothing except their feelings (e.g. “We will end all crime in America!” How?). Aspirations are not policies. Policies have calculable costs and consequences. We can analyze those. Hence a President can only be evaluated based on actionable policies, not wishes and dreams.
• Trump and Vance say a lot of random things and then forget them; and rarely build out an actionable policy from them. So it’s impossible to keep track of all these ephemeral, on-the-fly, and dubiously sincere assertions (like, will they or won’t they untax social security checks; or will they or won’t they implement Project 2025). The only steady account of their policy plans I can find is the official platform paper on their campaign website. So that’s what I will analyze. Likewise, the Harris-Walz platform is also summarized on their campaign website (with a much more detailed policy report than the GOP’s rambling and hard-to-follow-equivalent, Agenda 47).
• I will score a policy a 1 if it’s substantive enough to evaluate, will likely produce a net good for the country, and isn’t matched by a comparable policy in their opponent’s platform. I will score a 0 if it fails at any of those three metrics. And I will score a -1 for any policy substantive enough to evaluate that will likely produce a net bad for the country, and isn’t matched by a comparable policy in their opponent’s platform. I’ll then compare their total arithmetical scores.

That said, let’s take a look. Here in Part 1 I will address the Harris campaign platform. Then in Part 2 next week I will address the Trump campaign platform, and compare their scores.

The Harris-Walz Platform

Harris’s slogan is “Creating an Opportunity Economy,” which is nice, if a bit cliched. It does communicate a policy vision: she wants to increase the amount and degree of “opportunities” for all Americans to get out of any hole they may be stuck in and get ahead. And in general, I will say I believe there are better ways to do that than her fairly centrist platform (I am, after all, an advocate of universal basic income, and single-payer healthcare like the most of the first world has). But I understand she has to get elected to implement anything, and most American liberals are centrists terrified of bold goals, so we have to move incrementally (see my discussion of this point in How Far Left Is Too Left?). That’s fine.

You’ll notice a stark difference once you get to read my Part 2. Even Harris’s summary is substantially more specific than Trump’s; and they add an expanded document (called a Policy Book) that gets into yet more detail, including summarizing or citing reports and scientific studies and expert polls confirming that the impact of Harris-Walz policies will be substantially better than Trump’s. So Harris is making an argument for her platform, in a way that the corresponding Trump-Vance policy document does not (it has only rhetoric, not an evidential case; their paper is also shoddily composed, with an excess reliance on all-caps text and weirdly capitalized words, and formatted worse than a high school report, but I’m ignoring that). I also didn’t vet all of Harris’s cited evidence. I’ll just be looking at the policies as stated, given what I know personally from my own research.

• Middle Class Tax Cut

Top of the list, they promise “100 million working and middle-class Americans will get a tax cut.” That is already more specific than what we’ll get from Trump (stay tuned). And they say how they will pay for it: by “rolling back Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, enacting a billionaire minimum tax, quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks, and other reforms,” including an increase in the capital gains tax for millionaires. We know she believes this, and that it is the fiscally responsible thing to do. Our best tax regime, along with our best economy, was in the late 1950s, and we should return to it; our current regime is not only harmful economically, it’s a threat to national security—the rich should be taxed way more here, as they are everywhere else in the world that has a better quality of life.

Their clarity on this point also doesn’t stop with that vague “100 million working and middle-class Americans will get a tax cut.” They actually lay out how they will do that: they “will do this by restoring two tax cuts designed to help middle class and working Americans: the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit,” including a double credit for newborns. The DNC has always wanted this, so there is no doubt Harris-Walz will press for it, and it will help a lot of people. Taxes should be lower on the poor (especially parents raising children, if you believe in family values) and higher on the rich, and all past evidence in our country, and all evidence from present peer countries, demonstrates that that always works out better for everyone by every pertinent metric.

So this scores 1 for Harris-Walz. To be fair, as soon as she proposed it, Trump-Vance claimed they’d do it, too. But, even if we believe them, it doesn’t score here, because they will only increase the CTC, not the EIC, and are unclear on how much, while they offer no explanation of how they will pay for it. I also should note that the Trump website’s platform document says he won’t increase the CTC but keep it where it is (p. 9).

• Expanding Home Ownership

Next on the list, they “will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” This will certainly increase opportunity for ordinary Americans, and along with her plan to expand rental housing, it is surprising to see her jump on this so well when Trump is supposed to be the real-estate genius. She does not specifically say how this will be structured or how it will be paid for, but her Policy Book describes trial programs it is based on that have already proven successful (like the Detroit Down Payment Assistance Program which also awards $25,000), and those are structured as zero interest loans, meaning the buyer pays it all back eventually, so the same money can be turned back around to loan again. That means her program will only have a small net cost (for defaults and administration). And her policy here is based on empirical evidence and experience. Trump has no comparable policy.

So, score 1 for Harris-Walz. She’s batting 2 now.

• Helping Renters

Third, Harris says she has “a comprehensive plan to build three million more rental units and homes that are affordable to end the national housing supply crisis in her first term,” and she “will cut red tape to make sure we build more housing faster,” and “penalize firms that hoard available homes to drive up prices for local homebuyers.” Her expanded document gives more details on how she will accomplish each thing, and the effect will undeniably be good. But her specifics do start to run out at zoom.

For example, Harris says she will cut red tape and reduce the regulatory burden slowing housing supply, but it is not clear how she can do that. Most of it is not under federal control, and locally it has proven very hard to identify what red tape even can safely be cut. This issue isn’t new; communities have been struggling with it for years with little progress, so I am less certain of her success on that point. Regulations exist for a reason, and while Al Gore’s famed program under Bill Clinton to reduce unnecessary or excessive federal regs and red tape was remarkably successful and would be worth resurrecting, I’m not seeing specific promises like that here.

Still, I will score this at 1 (bringing Harris to 3), because the overall policy is at least a net positive, well-informed, and could bear fruit. In the Policy Book, Harris does describe more specific objectives like “the Stop Predatory Investing Act” that will “remov[e] key tax benefits for major investors that acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes,” thus reducing control of the housing market by predatory mega-investors, and the “Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act, to crack down on companies that contribute to surging rent prices” with computerized market manipulation, and various kind of grant programs and incentives, building on or even using already existing infrastructure funds. All of this will undeniably be good (we should live in a world where these laws exist), even if what impact they will have (how much any or all of these will actually reduce rents nationwide) is unknown. It’s at least a substantive policy with hopeful prospects.

There isn’t anything comparable from Trump. We’ll get to it in Part 2, but the Trump-Vance platform makes promises on this, but lacks any clear or specific policy.

• Promoting Small Businesses

Fourth, Harris “will expand the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000 and take on the everyday obstacles and red tape that can make it harder to grow a small business,” or as they expand on in their fuller doc, “making it easier for small businesses to file taxes and removing unnecessary or excessive occupational licensing requirements.” Trump also promises to cut red tape, but he doesn’t get even this specific (the phrases “small business” and “startup” aren’t even in his plan). But Harris is still inadequately specific herself, giving no examples of what she means we could “cut” here. What licenses will we be getting rid of? And is that even a good thing?

I’ll say more about that when I get to Trump’s proposals in Part 2. But unlike him, Harris does have pages and pages of ideas in her expanded document, of programs to develop or laws to pass to help small businesses, and her startup deduction bump is a good idea and will have an impact. And though she doesn’t specifically say how she will pay for it, I think that’s calculable. Even if we don’t count the new tax revenues earned from those businesses, she expects to grow six million businesses a year, which puts this program’s cost at around 1% the national budget—and her plan to make reasonable increases in the corporate tax rate (yet still to below historic highs, and close to global average) will more than cover that. So this scores 1 to Harris, bringing her to 4.

• Reigning in High Prices

Fifth, Harris “will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states” to fight artificially rising prices and “will take on Big Pharma” and “middlemen” to “lower drug prices.” The full doc has pages of examples of successful price-gouging laws, many even in red states, demonstrating proof of concept (and, in case you were wondering, she is not talking about price controls, but defining and penalizing improper markups, based on already successfully implemented laws).

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has already born fruit with its sensible drug pricing policies, based largely on allowing medicare negotiation, and partly on some reasonable price caps, such as for insulin, all of which really just bringing America in line with what other first world countries are already doing. I think these two programs will work (they already have in various places), and they will undeniably be good. One might question how much impact they will have, but it will be a net positive. Trump also promises to bring down prices, but he does not have any similar plans to actually do that (we’ll see what his platform says about this in Part 2). So Harris scores a 1 here, for a total of 5.

• Improving Healthcare

Besides the obvious (Harris will protect and improve the ACA, continuing Biden-era policies to that end—we’ll see in Part 2 how that contrasts with Trump’s plans), Harris says “medical debt will be removed from credit reports,” and she has already “helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans” and “as President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.” There is a proof of concept, a program implemented in North Carolina that Harris has been closely coordinating with. Since this is really just a stopgap stepwise measure toward universal healthcare, it counts essentially as moving in that direction, and is therefore a net positive, regardless of its costs (and its costs aren’t high). Substantive medical debt, really, should not even exist in this country (as it doesn’t in most first world countries). Yet Trump’s platform does not even mention this as a problem. So I have to give Harris a 1 here (making 6).

• Protecting Social Security and Medicare

It’s unclear what Trump will actually do about these programs. He waffles, and wavers based on which position he thinks makes him the most liked. His policy document says he will make no cuts and won’t increase the retirement age. Harris quotes and cites him saying the opposite. It’s unclear which position would prevail with him, so I consider this a wash as far as scoring goes. If he makes you nervous on this point, Harris is definitely a step up for you as a voter, because she definitely believes in these programs and wants to strengthen and protect them. But there is one substantive policy difference between Harris and Trump here: she vows to make “millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes” into these programs, ensuring their solvency. I believe her (it’s long been a DNC goal). And it’s the right thing to do (it’s what every other decent country does). So on that point alone—proposing an actual solution to the solvency issue of these programs—she scores 1. She’s batting a 7 now.

• Promoting Jobs

Both Trump and Harris speak about bringing more manufacturing jobs back to America. I’ll discuss what Trump proposes in Part 2, but it’s nothing comparable to Harris, so I’ll score it on its own. But contrary to Trump’s repeated lying about them, Biden-Harris have already been much better on this metric than Trump, and their policies, if kept in place, will only continue this marked improvement. For example, Harris plans to continue the push to onshore more microchip manufacturing. And she will support unions (something a union-busting Trump is less likely to do), and (unlike Trump) she has offered specific legislative proposals to do that, including signing into law the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act.

I think this matters more than many voters realize, because manufacturing (particularly at the foundational level, such as machining, without which you can’t even build the factories that make stuff) is essential to national security. Just imagine a war with China, when we have been relying on Chinese machinists rather than honing our own—we wouldn’t even be able to expand military capacity like we did in WW2, because we literally won’t have enough skilled labor. What would we do when all trade with China ends—how will we keep our cars running, still have smartphones for everyone, or even manufacture basic pharmaceuticals? Trade with other manufacturing countries is a net good (it can even help improve the economies of the third world, which we benefit from in less conflict and immigration pressure); but we can’t become critically dependent on it. Although a 21st century economy is more dependent on other professions now (like services and coding), it still rests on a foundation of manufacturing. Trump seems to also get this, but he has different ideas about what to do for it, so I’ll score that separately.

Harris will also aim to “raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities, establish paid family and medical leave, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” All good things that other countries have, and we should have had long ago—and that have been amply studied and worked into specifics, so it’s not even novel or radical to support these things. Trump has nothing comparable on offer.

One might worry that raising the minimum wage will reduce rather than increase jobs, but when staged in implementation until the minimum wage is locked to inflation, it doesn’t. Which is why we saw the federal minimum wage go from $3.80 under Reagan to $7.25 under Obama (where it has remained stuck ever since), yet gained 50 million jobs in that same period, and why even the unemployment rate does not correlate with minimum wage increases. For example, the wage went up nearly a dollar in every year from 2007 to 2009, yet by 2011 the unemployment rate was plummeting, dropping nearly a whole point every year, from a high of 9% in 2009-2010 to a low of 4% by 2019, where it remains today (after an expected spike during the pandemic).

So with all of these plans to help the job market together, I give Harris another score of 1 (bringing her now to 8). Trump could earn a point here, too, if his different policies also merit; but we’ll see.

• Promoting Education

The Harris-Walz education platform summary is too light on specifics to score (just lots of promises, and descriptions of what Biden has already done that Harris would continue). Her Policy Book fills in some blanks, but not enough (apart from policies I already scored above).

For examples:

• That Harris “will get rid of unnecessary degree requirements for hundreds of thousands of federal jobs” is at least semi-specific, but lacks an important piece of information: examples. What jobs can actually be done by people not meeting those requirements? It’s important to remember that American education objectively sucks. The average high school student can’t even write a coherent letter. The reason we have leaned on college is to weed them out (and even then only to moderate success), which is an extremely expensive and inefficient solution. By contrast, other countries’ school systems leave secondary school graduates with college-level competency already. I am not confident Harris’s plan to skip that step will be good for anyone; it might simply degrade the quality and competency of federal administration. Her policy thus lacks required specifics, such as how these applicants will be vetted for competency without the college degree replacing that function, or statistics on how many viable non-college applicants even exist in America, or whether this will be hurting college graduates by rendering their degrees a loss. For example, are job positions going unfilled now so that we need to expand the hiring pool, or will letting non-graduates in only block advancement for graduates? It could be the former (as college degrees tend to get higher pay in the private sector). But…is it? Without relevant data here, I can’t vet this policy’s merits.
• Conversely, Harris boasts of how Biden “invested more than $750 million in expanding Registered Apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship programs,” which is great, but not new. The policy is already in place. Harris doesn’t say by what dollar amount she would increase this (if at all), or how she will pay for it (although to be fair the current price tag is so low as to be essentially budget-invisible). There is a lot of this sort of thing. Harris touts the Biden “Good Jobs” and “Workforce Hubs” initiatives, for example, which are great, but she doesn’t make any specific claims about how she would increase or improve them. It’s likely Trump will kill them (as they fit the category of the kind of thing he calls waste), but we can’t be sure of that, so I can’t really give a confident score here.
• Similarly, Harris promises to “provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief” but she doesn’t say how, or how she will pay for it. I agree it would be good (some successful countries already have free college education for their citizens, and many American states already have state-subsidized college education for their citizens, so we have empirical support for moving in that direction), but it all depends on the specifics of how it will be implemented, which I don’t see provided.

So on education, though I see some good ideas here (including some solid accomplishments under Biden-Harris), her future policy changes aren’t specific enough to score. She gets a 0.

• Care Economy

Harris promises to expand “high-quality home care services for seniors and people with disabilities and ensuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care,” and likewise support care workers. But the summary states no actual policy to accomplish any of this, and her expanded Policy Book doesn’t do much better. She discusses things already done under Biden-Harris, reiterates increasing the Child Tax Credit (which I already scored), and cites some evidence of how Trump went the other direction on this industry, making childcare more expensive. Trump’s official policy says he will do kind of the same things Harris vaguely promises, and though he might be lying (you can be the judge of that), I’m going to score these policies as stated. As such, the net effect here is a score of 0. Which again is not a criticism; Harris’s goals are valorous, and I trust her more than Trump on them, but in terms of described policy, they are a wash.

• Energy Policy

Harris’s summary is vague (I suspect editorial fatigue set in, given the last few entries were weaker tea than the first several), promising to lower energy costs and expand clean energy (and thereby increase jobs), but with no actual policy described. The Policy Book only describes statistical accomplishments toward these ends under the policies of Biden-Harris that Harris vows to continue (p. 29). But we cannot be sure Trump wouldn’t also (I leave that to your own judgment as a voter). I must note that Trump lies about this repeatedly. Domestic oil and gas production, including fracking, have actually reached record highs under Biden-Harris and due to actual Harris votes, so she has proven her record here; and investing in clean energy, such as Biden-Harris did through the Inflation Reduction Act and other infrastructure bills, is a boon and not a threat to the economy, both creating jobs and reducing overall energy costs. But since no specifically new policy is described here, I have to score it a 0. We’ll see what Trump scores on energy later.

Conclusion

My scoring for the Harris-Walz platform is an 8 overall. This does not measure degree of impact, so it’s anamorphic. I’m just counting things she says she will do and whether they will be in any degree a net positive or not. I’ll give Trump the same chance to rack up points on the same terms in Part 2 next week. But I have to bring special attention to the fact that Harris has a detailed policy platform, often full of specifics or even empirical arguments for them. Trump’s policy document doesn’t. Harris also gives empirical reasons to believe she will pursue these policies, as a matter of consistent styling of each policy entry. Trump doesn’t have that; he only occasionally throws in a random argument to this effect, and none well developed. And all of Harris’s ideas are evidence-based and reasonable (IMO they aren’t ambitious enough, but any step forward is good). This is one thing we tend to get from the DNC and not the GOP: detailed, science-based policy. The difference has never been starker than in this election cycle, as you’ll see in my next entry.