Over at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, we learn that VP Harris is embracing the Biden administration’s tax agenda:
The campaign has also communicated to us that Vice President Harris continues to support all of the revenue-raising provisions in the President’s FY 2025 budget. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget will analyze the fiscal impact of any such offsets once they are released.
Okay, then. Let’s consider what that looks like. Here are a few of the tax hikes in the Biden budget for FY2015 (my comments in paratheses):
Business-tax proposals include:
• Increase the corporate rate to 28 percent. (This amounts to a promise to reduce wages, given what we know about who actually pays the corporate tax. Also, with the average state rate, that’s 32 percent, or the second-highest in the world.)
• Quadruple the stock buyback tax.
• Deny the deduction for all compensation over $1 million for all C corporations.
• Eliminate tax preferences for fossil fuels. (I am all in favor of that, but I would like to see the green-energy tax subsidies go too.)
Individual-tax proposals include:
• Increase the top income-tax rate. (That’s 39.2 percent.)
• Impose a 25 percent minimum tax on those with wealth exceeding $100 million. (More class warfare.)
• Tax capital gains at ordinary rates for households with over $1 million in earnings. (That’s over 44 percent.)
• Tax unrealized gains at death. (Unrealized gains!)
For the whole thing, look at Adam Michel’s analysis here.
The Harris-Walz plan has lots of tax subsidies too, some of which you also find in the Biden budget:
• Restore the American Rescue Plan Act’s expanded child tax credit. (That’s lots of spending through the tax code with plenty of disincentives to work.)
• Expand the low-income-housing tax credit. (That’s a handout to investors, developers, and financial companies.)
• Provide a new tax credit for first-time homebuyers. (That will increase the price of housing.)
• Expand the earned-income tax credit by increasing the credit available to workers who do not have child dependents for tax purposes.
Tim Walz may talk about “freedom” and keep shouting “Mind your own damn business!” — but if this comes to pass, there will be no economic freedom under a Harris-Walz administration.