Kamala Harris’ Tax Policies

And misallocation of those tax collections. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to raise taxes on Americans and our corporations by some $5 trillion over the next decade and cut other taxes by more than $4 trillion. Or so she claims, especially regarding the latter. The former can be taken as gospel; raising taxes, especially on those Evil Rich Americans, is what Party does.

Under her plan, taxes would go up sharply on some high-income households, and top marginal tax rates would reach their highest point since 1986. The wealthiest investors and company founders would encounter sizable s that they don’t face under current law.

That capital-gains tax bill is made the more sizable by her plan to tax capital gains that haven’t been realized—i.e., gains that don’t exist.

Her claim to not have any tax increases on households making under $400,000 is shown to be a sham promise by her decision to ignore the effect her corporate tax increase to 28% and her increase in the diktated [sic] minimum corporate tax to 21% would have on middle-income workers and shareholders. The impact includes that tax on phantom capital gains that Harris wants to impose on us middle class workers who own shares of companies in our own, however miniscule, portfolios.

Left unanswered, so far, is what Harris intends to do with those tax revenues. Her silence here stands against the backdrop of the Biden-Harris administration’s years long cuts, in real terms, to funding for our defense establishment, leaving us the weakest we’ve been in decades at the moment of greatest national security danger we’ve faced in decades.

This tax policy also is one of the reasons Harris floated her price controls proposal—to try to distract us from the policies she’s serious about slipping past, a squirrel maneuver which a compliant press is actively aiding her with its concentration on price control proposals while minimizing coverage of the rest of her ideas.

What’s in Harris’ Econ Plans?

Here’s an overview.

  • federal limits on price increases for food producers and grocers
  • legislation creating a new series of tax incentives for builders who construct “starter” homes sold to first-time homebuyers
  • $40 billion innovation fund for businesses building affordable rental housing units
  • provide $25,000 in potential down payment assistance to help some renters buy a home
  • accelerate Medicare and other federal programs to “negotiate” with drugmakers to lower the cost of prescription medications
  • work with state entities to cancel $7 billion of medical debt for up to 3 million qualifying Americans
  • make permanent a $3,600 per child tax credit
  • new $6,000 tax credit for those with newborn children
  • cut taxes for some frontline workers by up to $1,500

Each one of these is inflationary in its own right, and each one will drive a need to increase taxes in order to pay for them.

It seems to me—and the press is complicit in this, however unintentionally, with its focus—that Harris’ plan for price controls on those food producers and grocers to combat what she’s pleased to call “price gouging” is nothing but a distraction to draw attention away from her other proposals in order to get many of them enacted unnoticed.

Yes and No

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened one of their Friday editorials with this:

On taxes and spending, he [Minnesota Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice President nominee-in-waiting Tim Walz] has sought to outdo California progressives and is making Illinois look like a model of fiscal discipline.
Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies and refusing to lay out her own policy agenda. This makes Mr Walz’s record as Governor over the last six years all the more revealing as a window on the duo’s plans for the country.

It’s certainly true that Walz’s behavior as governor is demonstrative. It is, though, not entirely “all the more revealing” of a Harris-Walz profligate tax and more profligate spend policy, should they get elected. The editors make that clear in their own words, for all that they seem not to recognize that: Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies.

Harris is not at all “refusing to lay out her own policy agenda.” The Biden-Harris policies are precisely the policies she’s intent on continuing, and that extends far beyond economics. Harris, and Walz beside her, are intent on continuing the Biden-Harris open borders policy, and they’re intent on continuing the Biden-Harris policy of speaking loudly while carrying no stick at all regarding our nation’s most dangerous enemies, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran.

Harris’ slipstreaming is her statement, if not in so many words, of the policies she intends to pursue in a Harris-Walz administration.

Kamala Harris and a Smattering of History

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proud of her record as California’s Attorney General. Here’s an example from that proud record of hers, against the backdrop of the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s lawfare campaign against their political opponent, former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As AG, Harris demanded nonprofits in her jurisdiction hand over their federal IRS Forms 990 Schedule B so she could pretend to be investigating self-dealing and improper loans involving those organizations and their donors. Her office then promptly “leaked” 2,000 Conservative cause-supporting organizations’ Schedules B to the public via Harris’ Attorney General Web site. Those organizations and their donors then began receiving threats of retaliation and death threats.

It won’t matter that the Supreme Court blew up her California AG case in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta. She’s already shown her disdain of the Court and complete disregard for its rulings; her demand for those Schedules B (much less her release of so many submittals) was in complete disregard of a much earlier, already long-standing Supreme Court NAACP v Alabama ruling which had held that similar demands violated the 1st Amendment’s right freely to associate as a critical aspect of the Amendment’s explicit Free Speech Clause.

Harris will continue Party’s lawfare campaigns against those of whom Party elite personally disapprove. This is the empirical practice and view of “law” that the highly experienced, and proud of that experience, Harris will bring to her administration, including the Department of Justice that she will build during her term.

That’s if we average Americans are foolish enough to elect her.

Tax Cuts are Costly

Arkansas’ Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed into law the State’s latest round of individual and corporate tax cuts. “Finance officials” say that

the cuts will cost about $483 million the first year and $322 million a year after that.

Sanders also has signed into law a different tax cut, this one in the form of a tax credit increase. This one

increases the homestead tax credit from $425 to $500, retroactive to January 1.

“Finance officials” piped up again:

That cut will cost $46 million.

Cost whom, exactly? The money isn’t the State government’s after all. The money belongs to the citizens of Arkansas, they just remit it in the form of tax levies. It doesn’t cost the government a single copper penny to not get what doesn’t belong to it.

Beyond those “financial officials'” distortion, there’s another item missing from their pseudo-analysis.

Those officials are ignoring the impacts of the increased economic activity in the State’s private economy from all that money now being left in the private hands of the State’s citizens and private businesses. There are two primary impacts. One is the increased prosperity of those citizens both from their being able to hold onto more of their money and from that increased economic activity. The other is the increased tax receipts the government will receive, on net despite the reduced tax rates, from the increased aggregated revenues flowing from all that increased economic activity.