In a campaign otherwise light on policy specifics, Vice President Kamala Harris this week 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 adopted a number of tax increases that President Biden proposed in the spring. Ms. Harris’s 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, Ms. Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations. 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 J. 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 that would raise taxes on large corporations. Chief among them is raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent, a step that 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, Ms. Harris has also endorsed raising a tax on stock buybacks to 4 percent from 1 percent. 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 percent 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. Mr. Biden’s budget — and now Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign — calls for increasing that minimum tax to 21 percent from 15 percent.
In his budget, Mr. 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 aims to stop companies moving into low-tax jurisdictions to avoid paying taxes. Mr. Biden’s budget calls for increasing and reorganizing 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 percent from 10.5 percent.
The budget Ms. Harris has now adopted also disallows companies from deducting the compensation of all employees making more than $1 million.
