The Kamala Harris campaign seized on a comment earlier this week from Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance deriding efforts to retool a Michigan auto plant as mere “table scraps.”
“Apparently 650 families’ livelihood is just ‘table scraps’ there,” said Gene Sperling, an economic advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, in a video conference call with reporters on Thursday.
On Tuesday, Vance attacked a program that would spend $500 million to help overhaul a Lansing, Michigan, auto plant that used to produce Chevrolet Camaros so that it can instead build electric vehicles.
“What we’ve said is that Kamala Harris is offering table scraps. Five-hundred million dollars when you have an EV mandate that’s going to cost 117,000 autoworker jobs,” Vance said, citing figures from a study by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank staffed by several prominent Trump administration alumni.
“I think that Michigan autoworkers deserve more than the table scraps of Kamala Harris’s Green New Deal,” he added.
The $500 million grant would be part of a larger $1.7 billion program aimed at revamping 11 auto plants to make electric cars or components of them as part of the Joe Biden administration’s effort to speed up the conversion of Americans’ internal combustion-powered cars to more efficient and reliable electric ones.
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, also criticized Vance’s remarks.
“It’s going to secure us 650 jobs,” Fain said, citing a GM estimate that 650 jobs would be saved. “Vance refuses to commit to the funding and what his offer would be to workers because their offer is nothing.”
The conference call was held ahead of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s planned appearance before the Detroit Economic Club later Thursday. Trump, who is campaigning while appealing a criminal conviction in New York, is set to give an economics-focused speech, though many of his previous attempts to do that have been rehashes of his standard stump speech.
Both campaigns are fighting hard for Michigan and its 15 Electoral College votes, with union workers among the most contested groups. In the call, Sperling and Fain said Trump’s economic plans, which would include huge tariff increases on imported goods that economists say would risk hiking inflation and starting an international trade war, would be disastrous for workers.
“His plan will rip away direct investments in union workers and manufacturing in this country and communities. He’s threatening everyone’s livelihoods. He’ll gladly close our plants if it saves his billionaire buddies another penny and Wall Street another penny,” Fain said.
Sperling said Trump’s plans to roll back tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act would result in tax hikes.
“He is calling for increasing taxes on manufacturing in the United States because, unlike his tax incentives, all of the Harris tax incentives reward and are designed to help companies that are investing in the United States,” Sperling said.
“So he would be raising taxes hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, breaking commitments to investments targeted only to manufacturing only in the United States.”
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According to polls, Trump holds an advantage in the public’s perception of which candidate can be trusted on the economy, in part because of inflation spiking in 2022. The Harris campaign is trying to close the gap.
But a new report from the Labor Department on Thursday found that annual inflation had fallen to 2.4% in September, its lowest level since February 2021.
At the same time, the number of manufacturing jobs has surpassed pre-pandemic levels since July. In September, there were 12.92 million U.S. manufacturing jobs. Prior to the pandemic, manufacturing jobs had peaked at 12.83 million in January 2019.