Today's Edition
The New York Times News Service
In a campaign otherwise light on policy specifics, Vice President Kamala Harris quietly rolled out her most detailed, far-ranging proposal yet: nearly $5 trillion in tax increases over a decade.
That’s how much more revenue the federal government would raise if it adopts a number of tax increases that President Joe Biden proposed in the spring. Harris’ campaign said this week that she supported those tax hikes, which were thoroughly laid out in the most recent federal budget plan prepared by the Biden administration.
No one making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the plan. Instead, Harris seeks to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations significantly. Congress has previously rejected many of these tax ideas, even when Democrats controlled both chambers.
While tax policy is right now a subplot in a turbulent presidential campaign, it will be a primary policy issue in Washington next year.
The next president will have to work with Congress to address the tax cuts Donald Trump signed into law in 2017. Many of those tax cuts expire after 2025, meaning millions of Americans will see their taxes go up if lawmakers don’t reach a deal next year.
Here’s an overview of what we now know - and still don’t know - about the Democratic nominee’s views on taxes.
Higher taxes on corporations
The most recent White House budget includes several proposals to raise taxes on large corporations. Chief among them is raising the corporate tax rate from 28% to 21%, which the Treasury Department estimated could bring in $1.3 trillion in revenue over the next 10 years.
Because the vice president supports the Biden budget’s tax hikes, Harris has also endorsed raising a tax on stock buybacks to 4% from 1%. Democrats first approved the stock buyback tax in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation also requires big companies to pay taxes worth at least 15% of the income they report to investors.
The goal of the new minimum tax is to curb companies’ ability to use deductions and tax credits to shrink their tax liability to as low as zero. Biden’s budget - and now Harris’ presidential campaign - calls for increasing that minimum tax to 21% from 15%.
In his budget, Biden also put out an overhaul of how multinational companies’ foreign earnings are taxed in the United States. The goal is to bring the United States into compliance with an international agreement that seeks to stop companies from moving into low-tax jurisdictions to avoid paying taxes. Biden’s budget calls for increasing and reorganising a global minimum tax. Under the plan, the tax would be assessed on income in each individual country where the company operates, rather than on its global profits overall. The rate would double to 21% from 10.5%.
The budget Harris has now adopted also disallows companies from deducting the compensation of all employees making more than $1 million.
High-earning Americans would pay more
The White House tax plan would raise taxes on high-income Americans through two avenues: First, by increasing the rate they pay on existing income taxes, and second, by more broadly reshaping the taxation of investment gains for the wealthiest taxpayers.
Harris would set the top marginal income rate at 39.6%, up from 37%. On top of that, she would also increase the rate on two parallel Medicare surtaxes to 5% from 3.8% for Americans making more than $400,000 and expand the income subject to one of them. Together, the Medicare and income proposals would create a top marginal rate as high as 44.6%.
Wealthy Americans would see more fundamental changes in how gains on investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets are taxed. For Americans making more than $1 million a year, investment earnings would be taxed at the same rate as regular income instead of at the lower rates for capital gains.
The White House tax plan targets what some Democrats see as a gaping loophole in the tax code: the so-called step-up in basis. Under the current law, Americans owe capital gains taxes when an asset is sold, but not if they pass those assets on to someone else at the time of their death. That means someone who inherits assets from a deceased parent, for example, does not have to pay taxes on how much those assets have appreciated since they were purchased. Instead, the person who inherits the assets has to pay taxes on the gains only from the time they were inherited - and only once they are sold.
Harris has endorsed a plan to tax the gains on those assets at the original owner’s death, though several exemptions would apply, including when a surviving spouse inherits the assets.
