Harris answers critics with detailed economic plan and sharp criticisms of Trump

For weeks, Republicans have complained that Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has skimped on detailed proposal for how she would bring the American economy out of the post-pandemic period that has seen the highest inflation in decades.

On Wednesday, she answered by laying out plans to center her presidency around building and strengthening the American middle class and describing the US election as a choice between what she described as two “fundamentally different” visions of the economy held by her and former president Donald Trump, her Republican opponent.

Harris said Trump, a wealthy former real estate developer and reality television star who is currently facing criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions, is “only interested in making life better for himself and people like himself, the wealthiest of Americans.”

By contrast, she said her own middle-class upbringing, in which she was raised by a single mother, left her committed to working with the private sector to boost the fortunes of small business and empower American workers.

Responding to Trump and his allies, who frequently falsely accuse her of being a “communist” or a “Marxist,” the vice president instead told an audience of around 400 at the Pittsburgh Economic Club that she is “a capitalist” who believes in “free and fair market.”

“I understand the pressures of making ends meet. I grew up in a middle class family, and while we were more fortunate than many, I still remember my mother sitting at that yellow Formica table… just trying to make sure that she paid them off by the end of the month, like so many Americans, just trying to make it all work,” she said.

“Every day, millions of Americans are sitting around their own