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The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans.
As the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 threatened to decimate the economy, Mr. Trump signed a large stimulus package that included substantial aid for the poor. When President Biden and Ms. Harris took office in 2021, their administration pushed more big aid expansions through Congress as part of their pandemic-recovery plan, driving the poverty rate still lower.
But if the two candidates’ responses to that extraordinary period had elements in common, the lessons they took from it were very different.
In the pandemic-era programs, now mostly expired or reduced, Ms. Harris and other Democrats found reinforcement of their faith in the government’s power to ameliorate hardship. If elected, she would seek to sustain or expand many of them, including subsidies for food, health care and housing, and revive a change to the child tax credit that essentially created a guaranteed income for families with children. Those policies helped temporarily cut the poverty rate by more than half from prepandemic levels.
She backs a $15 federal minimum wage, which Republicans have fought, and is a vocal supporter of programs like subsidized child care and paid family leave meant to help balance work and family.
Mr. Trump says little about his role in pandemic-era poverty programs, which many Republicans view as having been excessive and fraud-ridden. Instead, he touts his 2017 tax cuts, which he credits for boosting the economy and reducing poverty to a prepandemic low, and he has vowed to extend them when they expire next year. Most of the direct benefit from those cuts went to corporations and the wealthy.
Mr. Trump’s poverty plans are otherwise vague, but his record is one of animosity toward the programs Ms. Harris would defend or expand. He sought to remove millions of people from Medicaid and food stamps, many of them low-wage workers. He has sought to reduce the number of people with subsidized housing and raise their rents.
While Democrats would build on pandemic policies, Republicans blame trillions in federal spending under President Biden and Ms. Harris for triggering inflation and say the aid discouraged work.
“The parties are further apart than they have ever been, at least in my memory, and I’m pretty old,” said Isabel V. Sawhill of the centrist Brookings Institution, who has been tracking antipoverty policy since the Kennedy administration. “The Democrats have gone left and the Republicans have gone right.”
There is often a difference between how candidates campaign and how they govern, and either aspirant’s power to carry out their policies will depend on who controls Congress.
Both candidates have been short on detail, and there are divisions within the parties. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, recently suggested a large tax credit for families with children, though it is not clear whether it would be available to the poor or if it has Mr. Trump’s support.
But their records while in office provide a road map to their priorities and approaches.
Poverty was already falling when Mr. Trump won his tax cut in his first year in office, but the pace of decline more than doubled in the next two years, to 11.8 percent in 2019, then a record low, using a Census Bureau figure that includes taxes and aid. While economists debate whether tax cuts were responsible, the episode reinforced Republican faith in them.
Still, about twice as many Americans would have been poor that year without safety net programs for food, housing, health care and other needs — many of which Mr. Trump sought to cut — according to an analysis of census data by the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “I don’t see how you can say these programs don’t make a difference,” said Christopher Wimer, the center’s director.
When pandemic aid kicked in, the poverty rate fell further, to 9.1 percent in 2020 under Mr. Trump, and to 7.8 percent in the first year of the Biden-Harris administration. That is a reduction of a third from prepandemic levels, despite the crisis. As the aid fell, poverty rose to 12.4 percent in 2022, the last year for which there is data.
Here is a look at the partisan differences on anti-poverty programs:
Health Care
No anti-poverty measure costs more, affects more people or divides the parties as much as health care. The 2010 Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, added millions of people to Medicaid, subsidized private insurance and cut the share of Americans who are uninsured nearly in half. Democrats regard it as a generational achievement.
Republicans say it costs the government and consumers too much and stifles innovation. They voted to repeal it dozens of times, and Mr. Trump’s high-profile effort to do so failed only narrowly. He then took action to suppress enrollment in the private plans and last year wrote, “Obamacare Sucks!”
Mr. Trump says he is no longer committed to killing the law but would make it “much better” without saying how. The Republican Study Committee, a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans, recently proposed cutting $4.2 trillion over 10 years from the subsidies, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a reduction of more than half. Democrats call such plans a repeal by another name.
Ms. Harris previously supported a version of “Medicare for all,” a government-run system for everyone, but now says she would focus on strengthening the Affordable Care Act. Her campaign suggested she would preserve temporary increases in the subsidies for private plan, which led to record enrollment. The latest Biden White House budget also seeks new aid for people in the 10 states where Republicans declined to expand Medicaid.
The modern food stamp program was created a half-century ago in a bipartisan deal and has intermittently retained bipartisan support. But Republican criticism of the program grew after a large increase in the rolls during the Great Recession proved enduring.
Mr. Trump has been especially critical, arguing that the program discourages work and attracts fraud. He repeatedly sought to shrink eligibility and expand work requirements, and every budget he issued would have cut spending on it by at least 25 percent, according to a forthcoming analysis by Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution. Alleging abuse, Mr. Trump once warned of a “food stamp crime wave.”
Where Republicans see “welfare,” Democrats see “nutritional support.” The Supplemental Nutrition Program, as food stamps are formally known, “must not only be protected but expanded,” Ms. Harris said as a senator, while proposing a large increase in children’s benefits.
By revising nutritional standards over Republican objections, the Biden administration raised average benefits by more than a quarter, the largest gain in the program’s history. About one in eight Americans now receives a monthly benefit of about $210 a person.
Similar fights have emerged over free school meals, which were offered to all students during the pandemic. Supporters say universal meals reduce stigma, and the Biden administration changed the program’s rules to encourage more schools to provide them. Republicans see wasteful spending. At least eight states have adopted universal meals, including Minnesota, where Ms. Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, championed the change.
Housing
Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden broke new ground in their 2020 campaign with a party platform that promised housing aid “for every eligible family,” seeking to address funding shortfalls that have left only a quarter of eligible households receiving help and wait times extending to years.
But they made little progress.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris included expanded housing aid for the poor in the 2021 “Build Back Better” plan, a multitrillion-dollar package of domestic initiatives. It would have renovated public housing and significantly increased the number of vouchers available to rent private apartments. Congress narrowly rejected the plan (which the conservative Heritage Foundation called the “largest welfare increase in U.S. history”) and the administration did not return to the issue in a significant way.
While Ms. Harris emphasized housing in a recent economic plan, she focused on home buyers and housing production, not subsidies to poor renters. This year’s party platform trims the ambition of the promised voucher expansion to low-income veterans and people leaving foster care.
Mr. Trump pursued opposite aims. He proposed to reduce housing vouchers by 250,000, or about 10 percent, a cut about the same size as the increase the Biden-Harris team proposed. He unsuccessfully sought new work requirements and rent increases. And he undid a high-profile rule meant to reduce racial discrimination, saying it would “destroy the suburbs.” The Biden administration has worked to reinstate it but has not finalized a new rule.
The parties clash on homelessness policy, too. The Biden-Harris administration embraces “Housing First,” which provides apartments to the homeless without demanding treatment for problems like drug abuse or mental health. Getting people off the streets saves lives, supporters say, and treatment is more effective when people have homes.
The Trump administration said the approach encouraged self-destructive behavior and urged Congress to curb it. Mr. Trump has campaigned on putting homeless people in camps.
The Child Tax Credit
On one issue, the candidates sometimes sound the same: Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris both helped expand the child tax credit and both boast about it. But they support very different plans.
Mr. Trump doubled the credit in his 2017 tax cut, giving families up to $2,000 per child to defray child-rearing costs. But his measure omitted the poorest children. About a third failed to get the full credit because their parents earned too little, and a tenth received nothing. Republicans saw a simple principle: tax cuts aid taxpayers, not low-income people who pay little or nothing in federal income taxes.
Democrats revamped the credit during the pandemic, temporarily raising it to $3,000 per child ($3,600 for the youngest children). Most notably, the money went to all poor and middle-class children, regardless of whether parents had jobs. That turned a tax credit into a policy the United States had never embraced: a guaranteed income for families with children, at a one-year cost of more than $100 billion. Child poverty fell by more than half from prepandemic levels as a result of the credit and other pandemic aid.
That measure expired after one year, and the Biden administration, facing unified Republican opposition, lost a fight to extend it. The credit reverted to its Trump-era form and child poverty returned to the highest level since 2018.
Ms. Harris has called the return of the broad credit a top priority and would add a $6,000 benefit for infants. In Minnesota, Mr. Walz won a state credit of $1,750 that includes all low- and moderate-income families. “This is what takes children out of poverty,” he said.
Most Republicans have called such programs welfare schemes, warning that unconditional cash aid will discourage work and marriage, leading to more poverty.
The seemingly fixed lines blurred a few weeks ago when Mr. Vance suggested in a television interview he might back a $5,000 per child credit. He is loosely affiliated with a conservative faction sympathetic to working-class aid, and some saw his comments as an effort to reposition the party. But Mr. Vance has not said if the poor would qualify, and queries to his campaign went unanswered.
Taxes and Budget
Aid for the poor depends in part on tax policy: More revenue makes it easier to provide help, less makes it harder. The candidates diverge in profound ways.
Mr. Trump would permanently extend his 2017 tax cut, which expires next year, at a 10-year cost of roughly $4 trillion, with the benefits concentrated among corporations and the richest Americans. Republicans argue the costs can be offset by increased growth and decreased spending. But his previous tax cuts swelled deficits.
Each of his budget proposals while in office sought large Medicaid and food stamp reductions. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, found he would have reduced nondefense discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy since Herbert Hoover.
The Harris campaign has said she would preserve the tax cuts for households making $400,000 or less, around 98 percent of Americans. The administration’s most recent budget, released in March, also called for about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade.
It aimed to divide the new revenue between deficit reduction and new programs, including two of Ms. Harris’s priorities — the $3,000 child tax credit that includes the poorest families and paid family leave.