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The 92-page party platform released Monday ahead of the Democratic National Convention offers clues to how Vice President Kamala Harris intends to pay for her economic agenda – but another document may be more of a direct template.
In a little-noticed portion of its Friday analysis of Harris’ new economic plans, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote that her campaign said it endorsed the suite of revenue options included in President Joe Biden’s recent budget.
“The campaign specifically told us that they support all of the tax increases on the high earners and corporations that are in the Biden budget, but they did not tell us” those changes would directly pay for Friday’s tax proposals, CFRB senior vice president Marc Goldwein told Semafor. “And obviously, none of them is specifically mentioned in this [Harris] plan.”
If Harris’ campaign stands by its statement to CFRB, that would go a long way toward filling in the fiscal blanks as she starts rolling out specific policy proposals. The tax plans she released Friday would cost roughly $2 trillion over 10 years, according to CFRB, while the proposed tax increases that Biden’s budget largely aimed at the wealthiest Americans and large corporations would raise nearly $5 trillion over 10 years.
“It reinforces the policies, the values and the themes that she’s already talked about, an economy that actually delivers for working people where the rich and corporations aren’t playing by different rules,” said Michael Linden, an ex-Biden White House budget staffer who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He added that Harris and her team were involved in helping draft White House budgets.
The Harris campaign did not respond to Semafor’s request for comment on whether it stood by the policies it told CFRB it supports, particularly the 28% corporate rate; Harris backed an even higher 35% rate during her 2020 presidential bid. NBC News later reported that Harris backed a 28% corporate tax rate.
The Democratic platform, though it was crafted before Biden dropped out of the race and features several references to his “second term,” includes several other tax changes that appear in Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget. Among them: support for the 25% “billionaire tax” on the income of the super-rich who claim more than $100 million in assets and quadrupling the stock buyback tax to 4%.
All of those changes are effectively on the table for Harris as ways to pay for her agenda.
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Harris’ advocacy for a 28% corporate tax rate represents a partial rollback of the GOP’s 2017 Trump-era tax law, but back in 2019 she called for a blanket repeal that would raise the corporate rate to 35%.
“On Day One, I will repeal that tax bill that benefits the top 1 percent and the biggest corporations of America,” Harris said in a Democratic primary debate that year.
Her moderation comes as her nascent campaign also moves decisively away from other progressive positions Harris endorsed during the 2020 primary, such as a ban on fracking for oil and gas and a “Medicare for All”-style public health care plan.
Of course, even as Donald Trump’s campaign accuses Harris of failing to provide specifics for how to pay for her ambitious economic plans, the former president himself is clearly lacking his own specific proposals to pay for his goals, such as eliminating taxes for tipped workers and exempting Social Security benefits from taxation.
Asked for more details on how Trump would pay the bills for his second-term agenda, Trump campaign advisors argued exempting Social Security benefits from taxes would encourage older Americans to stay employed longer – thus helping to financially shore up a program that’s growing the national debt. It’s a hypothesis embraced by Stephen Moore, an informal advisor to the Trump campaign.
“Unlike Kamala Harris, President Trump actually understands how the economy works and has a record of success to prove it. President Trump will cut wasteful government spending and make America a net-exporter of energy again, like we were in his first term, to help balance our nation’s budget and pay off our mounting debts,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told Semafor.
Harris’ early economic platform is anchored by a $6,000 child tax credit for parents of newborns, $25,000 in federal assistance for first-time homebuyers, and a restoration of the expanded child tax credit that provided cash payments for parents.
“It’s a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment when you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities. Everybody benefits and it pays for itself,” Harris said on Sunday.
Joseph’s view
Harris continues to dial back several of the positions she took during the left-leaning 2019 Democratic primary, embarking on a Great Moderation of sorts. Given how often Trump has shifted on big issues, however, it’s not clear whether he can force her to pay a political price for aligning more closely with the policies of the president she served under.
Perhaps the more important question is which of Harris’ expansive economic plans will take root within her party. Another plank of her new agenda, vowing to crack down on grocery price gouging, is taking some lumps from economists and daggers from the GOP.
Washington Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, demurred Friday when asked on the ground at the convention whether she would encourage party lawmakers to talk up Harris’ price gouging plan.
“Our candidates across the country are going to talk about the policies they think are important,” DelBene told reporters in Chicago.
Harris’ pitch to tax corporations, on the other hand, is popular with voters and most of her party’s lawmakers – though it won’t make her new friends among business interests that already view her campaign warily.
“Additional tax increases on corporations would only make it more difficult for U.S. businesses to invest at home, create American jobs and compete globally,” a Business Roundtable spokesperson told Semafor.
Kadia Goba contributed to this report.