The reasons for Kamala Harris' loss to Donald Trump have been well-discussed and dissected over the past week, and one of the biggest culprits seems to be the economic anxieties facing many Americans.
In a recent Bloomberg column, economist Kathryn Anne Edwards argued that these issues were generations in the making. For the bottom 60% of workers, inflation-adjusted wages have only increased $3 per hour over the past 50 years, pricing them out of basic necessities like food, housing, and medical care.
Can Trump really do anything to fix these economic patterns? Edwards told KNX News’ daily political show Countdown 2024 she has her doubts.
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“Can we fix everything in four years? Certainly not,” she said. “But can we move in the right direction? Hopefully.”
But Edwards said that none of Trump’s proposed economic policies would benefit the bottom 60% of workers “in any real or tangible way.”
While the U.S. has had a tight labor market with low unemployment in recent years, Edwards said there are more things we could be doing to encourage wage growth, like enforcing labor laws, raising the minimum wage, and encouraging unionization.
“We always talk about this, you know, white working-class male that used to have a manufacturing job, and there's nothing special about sitting in a hot crowded room, you know, taping up a box for eight hours except that it paid well and you’ve got health and retirement,” she said. “There's lots of jobs that don't have either of those things that we could make into the manufacturing jobs of yesteryear if we were willing to extend those types of unionized protection to workers.”
As for making big expenses like housing and child care more affordable, Edwards said we need “tailored approaches” for each issue.
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“I would say, you know, on the child care side, this should not be a market good” she said. “It might sound crazy when I say it like this, but it's just really hard to make the two-year-olds and three-year-olds that profitable. On the housing side, we need to have more building.”
Listen to the full episode above to hear politics reporter Dave Weigel discuss Trump’s cabinet picks, and catch new episodes every weekday at 2:30 p.m.
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