Vice President Kamala Harris is pledging not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year if she is elected in November, her campaign told POLITICO on Friday.
This expands the promise that the President Joe Biden became central to his administration’s economic agenda, arguing that corporations and the wealthy should instead pay a greater share of the tax burden. And it effectively precludes the prospect that Harris might adopt much more progressive policies as a candidate — such as massively expanding Social Security benefits — which would require raising taxes on a broader swath of Americans.
Biden sought to use the tax promise to bolster his appeal to working-class voters during his campaign. Now, as Harris builds her own economic platform — including the possibility of breaking some issues with Biden, who has suffered from low approval ratings over his handling of the economy — she plans to keep that core commitment intact.
“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to not just survive, but to thrive,” Harris said at a campaign rally earlier this week in Wisconsin. “Building the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”
The pledge comes as Democrats try to make taxes a key point of contrast with previous President Donald Trumpwho approved a major tax cut package during his first term and expressed his support for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.
The 2017 tax law proved to be unpopular at the time. And with much of this package about to be renewed next year, Harris, in her first week of the campaign, mirrored Biden’s attitude. rhetoric on the subjectportraying herself as a defender of the middle class while attacking Trump for his support for policies that would benefit the wealthy.
“He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations and make working families foot the bill,” Harris said Thursday at an American Federation of Teachers convention event in Houston. “America has tried these failed economic policies, but we are not going back.”
Harris has yet to lay out a detailed economic platform of her own since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, and she is expected to adopt much of Biden’s broader agenda amid a truncated three-and-a-half-month run-up to Election Day. Biden, throughout his term, has focused his economic policies on strengthening the working class, including efforts to expand safety net programs and reduce health care costs.
Biden, however fought to win over voters who blamed this agenda for rising prices and remained deeply skeptical about giving it credit for the country’s post-Covid recovery. But early polls indicate that Harris may not face as much entrenched opposition during her presidential run. A survey by the Democratic company Blueprint earlier this week showed Harris ahead of or even with Trump in terms of voter confidence on several economic issues. When it came to candidates that respondents trusted in implementing “fair taxes,” Harris was tied with Trump. Forty percent of respondents said Harris shares responsibility for Biden’s promise to raise taxes on the rich, a position that previous polls have shown is among the most popular elements of the president’s platform.
During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris supported a handful of economic proposals that went beyond Biden’s current agenda, including raising the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. Biden called for raising the corporate tax to 28 percent from the current level of 21 percent. At the time, she also suggested taxing certain stock trades and other financial transactions.
Harris’ campaign did not detail what specific tax policies she would include in her platform.
But keeping Biden’s $400,000 pledge means Harris is unlikely to embrace more progressive ideas that would require raising taxes on a broader segment of the population, like a proposal led by Sen. Bernie Sanders to increasing Social Security benefits at $2,400 per year.
The policy, which Sanders introduced to the White House earlier this year, would apply a payroll tax to all Americans’ income above $250,000 a year. But Biden refused to accept it, in part because it would violate his fiscal promise, arguing instead for bolstering the program’s solvency through higher taxes on wealthy individuals.
