Kamala Harris’s Tax Plan Is a Testament to the GOP’s Success

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 26, 2024

 

Per Politico:

 

Vice President Kamala Harris is pledging not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year if elected in November, her campaign told POLITICO on Friday.

 

That extends a promise that President Joe Biden made 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 rules out the prospect that Harris could embrace far more progressive policies as a candidate — such as massively expanding Social Security benefits — that would require raising taxes on a wider swath of Americans.

 

The implications of this ought not to be ignored. As my colleague Dominic Pino likes to observe, the Democrats’ insistence that nobody who makes under $400,000 should pay more in taxes than they currently do means that we have one party that opposes tax increases on 100 percent of Americans and another party that opposes tax increases on 98.2 percent of Americans. Moreover, in the case of the Democrats, that number is going up rather than down. In 2016, the party defined “middle-class” as anyone who made less than $250,000 per year. Now, its number is $400,000. And when it does attack Republicans on taxes, it tends to do so from the right. As I observed last year:

 

If you look back to 2017, you’ll notice that the Democratic Party’s attacks on the Republicans’ tax-cutting package came mainly from the right. In response to the GOP’s reductions, Democrats dishonestly (and somewhat successfully) attempted to convince the public that their taxes had gone up; complained that, in California and some parts of the Northeast, rich people who owned expensive homes would henceforth have to pay more to the Treasury each year; and griped that, unlike the corporate-rate cuts, the individual-rate cuts had not been made permanent.

 

Which matters, because:

 

as any economist will tell you, the dirty little secret of taxing-and-spending is that the real money lies in the middle. In England, the 40 percent income-tax rate kicks in at £50,271 ($63,321) for single filers, and it is supplemented by a value-added tax (VAT) on almost all consumer products that has risen over time to an astonishing 20 percent. In the United States, there is no 40 percent income-tax rate at the federal level, and the 37 percent bracket — the highest one we have — applies only once individuals have earned $578,126. If the United States is to adopt the social programs that the Democrats insist they covet, this will have to change dramatically.

 

(Thanks to inflation-adjusted brackets — another Republican innovation — that 37 percent rate now kicks in at $609,351.)

 

There is a great deal wrong with Kamala Harris’s economic policies, but it is telling that, on the question of individual tax rates, the Republican Party has so completely won the core of the argument that she feels as if she has no choice but to exclude all but 1.8 percent of Americans from her plans. I’m sometimes told that Republicans never win. Here, they have won so comprehensively that nobody even notices any more.