What Harris' pick of Tim Walz means for economic policy - Marketplace (2024)

After much speculation about who the Veep might choose for Veep, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her decision on Tuesday: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be her running mate in this year’s presidential election.

Walz made headlines in recent weeks for a viral moment in which he called former President Donald Trump and VP-hopeful J.D. Vance —who brings a more conservative economic populist view to the Republican ticket — “just weird.” Still, he is far from a household name for many Americans.

So what does can we learn from Walz’s track record as governor of Minnesota? And what does he bring to the table economically?

To learn more, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Eric Zwick,aprofessor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: Well, let’s start with a clip of Vice President Harris introducing her running mate, Minnesota governor and former representative Tim Walz.

Kamala Harris: And Tim Walz and I, we agree about many things, including when our middle class is strong, America is strong.

Ben-Achour: So when it comes to economic policy, how much continuity do you expect to see between a Biden-Harris administration and a Harris-Walz administration?

Zwick: I expect a fair amount of continuity on policies when the agenda is the same, and then as the agenda changes, we might see different policy focuses —so for instance, on tax policy or on housing or something like that.

Ben-Achour: For now though, the agendas are kind of identical?

Zwick: As far as I can tell. I think that we’re still waiting to see more articulation of, you know, specific economic policy proposals, and you can think about comparing those.

Ben-Achour: As governor of Minnesota, Walz helped see through policies on stronger labor protections, policies to reduce poverty, universal free meals at school, paid family leave and medical leave, a statewide child tax credit. Is that a reflection of specific policies Vice President Kamala Harris plans to push at the federal level?

Zwick: I think we saw early in the Biden administration a push for expanding the social safety net in directions that, you know, really invest in children —including an advanced child tax credit that was temporary and then expired, proposals for paid family leave, other policies, I think, in the spirit of this free school lunch program that the governor pursued. And to the extent economic research has something to say about policies like this, that policies that invest in children tend to have very high social returns because those kids go on to become more productive workers and pay taxes. So I might expect a continued focus on policies focused on kids.

Ben-Achour: Next year, the 2017 tax cuts signed by President Trump are largely set to expire. What happens to those in a Harris-Walz White House?

Zwick: Yeah. So most of the components of the 2017 tax cut that will expire happen on the individual side of the ledger. So if everything expired, we would see large tax increases across the income distribution. There were tax cuts in that reform that largely benefited the wealthy; those would go away. Relative to 2017, the budget situation is tighter now with higher interest rates. And on the corporate side, there will be a debate about restoring some tax incentives, and I would expect a Harris-Walz administration to be willing to sacrifice corporate rate tax cuts that were in the 2017 reform to bring some of those incentives back or to expand things like the child tax credit.