Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign canvass kickoff event at the Beaver County offices in Rochester, Pennsylvania, on August 18, 2024.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, her first major proposal as president to raise revenue and fund expensive programs.
Harris campaign spokesman James Singer told NBC News she would push for a 28% corporate tax rate, calling it “a fiscally responsible way to put money back into the pockets of working people and ensure that billionaires and big business owners The company pays its fair share.
“As President, Kamala Harris will work to create an economy of opportunity for the middle class that promotes their economic security, stability and dignity,” Singer wrote in an email.
If enacted, the policy would raise hundreds of billions of dollars, as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that a 1 percentage point increase in the corporate tax rate would be equivalent to raising about $100 billion over ten years. It would also undo a large portion of legislation signed by former President Donald Trump when he was president in 2017, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
At the same time, Trump recently said that if elected president, he would further cut taxes, including corporate tax cuts.
The move comes as Harris slowly added details to her vision for governing during the week of the Democratic National Convention, including conveying to critics how she would seek to pay for expensive ideas such as expanding the child tax credit and reducing The cost of housing and medical debt. So far, she has not provided a cost estimate for her proposal or matched it with payments.
The 28% corporate tax rate is lower than what Harris proposed during her failed 2020 presidential campaign, when she called for a full repeal of Trump’s tax cuts that would have restored the corporate tax rate to 35%. The new stance aligns Harris with President Joe Biden’s latest budget proposal.
Republicans are certain to oppose a 28% corporate tax rate, which means Harris may need Democrats to control both chambers of Congress to pass it in Congress. But potential President Harris will have some leverage over Republicans in tax policy negotiations because many other parts of Trump’s tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2025, leading to major debate in Congress next year over which parts should be extended.
At a recent press conference, Trump predicted that Democrats would be “under tremendous pressure” to renew expiring tax cuts next year and that “if Democrats don’t renew them or make it impossible to renew them,” it will “destroy the economy.” .
Meanwhile, Singer linked Trump to the “extreme Plan 2025 agenda” which he said would “drive up the deficit” and “increase taxes on the middle class” and cited Trump’s proposal to impose tariffs of up to 20% estimated impact.
