Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, Jul 23, 2025

Kamala Harris' economic policy: Roll back tax cuts, expand health care and middle-class tax breaks

Kamala Harris' economic policy: Roll back tax cuts, expand health care and middle-class tax breaks

Much like Biden, Harris is an advocate of higher taxes on businesses and high-income households, economists say.

Sen. Kamala Harris has a reputation as a prosecutor who cut both ways. Similarly, her positions on economic issues ranging from affordable housing to Wall Street have elicited muted praise — along with some caveats.

As Joe Biden’s choice for vice president, Harris, a California Democrat, shares many of the former vice president’s economic priorities, but she has also shown a willingness to go her own way or reach into the more progressive end of the party’s toolkit on a broad array of financial and economic hot-button topics.

The pandemic


“I think her policy perspective is very consistent with the need to help hard-pressed households that have been slammed by the pandemic,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “I think she’s focused on the right things.”

Most notably, Harris supported the idea of a $2,000 monthly stimulus check during the pandemic, a policy also advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang.

“The platform of the day that’s going to get people's attention has to be pandemic policy,” said Joseph Mason, professor of finance at Louisiana State University. “The $2,000 per person makes complete sense. This is a pandemic. This is something very, very rare."

Mason also said that Harris’ pledge to fight for social and racial justice has pandemic-specific ramifications, given that low-income and communities of color have been disproportionately hit by COVID-19. Democratizing access to a vaccine, when one becomes available, by insuring that low-income and essential workers are near the front of the queue could provide Harris with populist support and momentum for more wide-ranging health, safety and security initiatives, he said.

“There's a tremendous opportunity to promote social unity in line with meaningful public health goals by making sure that grocery store workers, fast-food workers — all these people who have been in touch with the public, toiling away to provide for their families — can get it,” Mason said. “You’re showing that there’s not an elitism. That would be, to me, a tremendous public health and social initiative. You can leapfrog from that into health care access.”

Health care costs


In the short term, Harris pledged to shore up the Affordable Care Act, and outlined a 10-year transition plan to overhaul the nation’s piecemeal health care system and rein in soaring costs projected to reach as much as $6 trillion a year by the next decade.

Initially a proponent of the “Medicare for All” cause championed by Sanders, Harris later backpedaled (a reversal some pundits said caused her to lose ground in the primary fight) and introduced a hybrid that would include a public Medicare option while still letting for-profit insurers compete.

Harris touted many proposals first pushed by Sanders to pay for the program, including changes to income, payroll and estate taxes to make them more progressive in addition to higher taxes on businesses and the richest Americans.

Wall Street


While similar to Sanders’ overall model for paying for an overhauled health care system, Harris tweaked her version by lopping out an incremental income tax increase she said would hit the middle class too hard and replacing it with a tax on Wall Street trades: Stock trades would be taxed at 0.2 percent, or $2 per $1,000, and bond trades would be taxed at half that.

Experts say this would have to be done strategically to avoid inadvertently squashing financial activity or driving it to offshore tax havens. “I do think you have to be very careful how that’s designed and implemented, but I definitely think that’s a place we should look for additional revenue,” Zandi said.

“We found that there is reason to be cautious about the design of any financial transaction tax, particularly if you design it so it can be easily evaded,” said Garrett Watson, senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation. “Especially looking at that as a revenue source for health insurance, you need that to be a stable source of revenue."

Housing Affordability


Harris advocated for helping people struggling with the high cost of rent, proposing a tax credit for renters paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities. “Prior to the pandemic, one of the key policy concerns was around the affordable housing crisis, both for rent and homeownership,” Zandi said. “It was contributing to the increase in homelessness, which she obviously saw firsthand in California.”

But economics experts caution that this policy only addresses half the problem: There is still a nationwide shortage of housing stock attainable for many lower- and middle-income households, and subsidizing rents could have an unintended consequence of driving those costs higher. “I’d be paying more attention to increasing the supply of affordable housing as opposed to helping support rental payments,” Zandi said.

“I think it is good to get off this platform of everyone should own a home … so rental assistance is worthwhile,” Mason said. “Anytime you give a subsidy like that, you’re aiding a market … You need to make sure that just doesn’t leak out the other side in profit,” he said. “It’s a complex web of incentives.”

Income and taxes


Harris has stated support for a national $15-an-hour minimum wage, and said she wants to penalize companies that skirt the rules on worker pay and “empower” labor unions that have been weakened by “right to work” laws.

But a much higher-profile priority for Harris is the reversal of the GOP-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act decreases in tax rates for businesses and rich Americans. “Much like Biden, she’s an advocate of higher taxes on businesses and higher-income, wealthy households,” Zandi said.

The platform laid out on Harris’s website promised to “reverse President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar tax cut for big corporations and the top 1 percent.” Those funds would go toward one of her signature policy initiatives: a refundable tax credit that would effectively function as a big expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The LIFT (Livable Incomes for Families Today) the Middle Class Act, which Harris introduced in 2018, would give a tax credit of up to $6,000 for households with annual income under $100,000.

On this issue, Watson said Harris was pushing the envelope further than her would-be boss. “We haven't seen something of that scope or scale from Biden,” he said. “One perceived advantage is you take something like that and make it permanent… and move the ball forward on what they think is good tax policy in the long run.”

Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
US Treasury Secretary Calls for Institutional Review of Federal Reserve Amid AI‑Driven Growth Expectations
UK Government Considers Dropping Demand for Apple Encryption Backdoor
Severe Flooding in South Korea Claims Lives Amid Ongoing Rescue Operations
Japanese Man Discovers Family Connection Through DNA Testing After Decades of Separation
Russia Signals Openness to Ukraine Peace Talks Amid Escalating Drone Warfare
Switzerland Implements Ban on Mammography Screening
Japanese Prime Minister Vows to Stay After Coalition Loses Upper House Majority
Pogacar Extends Dominance with Stage Fifteen Triumph at Tour de France
CEO Resigns Amid Controversy Over Relationship with HR Executive
Man Dies After Being Pulled Into MRI Machine Due to Metal Chain in New York Clinic
NVIDIA Achieves $4 Trillion Valuation Amid AI Demand
US Revokes Visas of Brazilian Corrupted Judges Amid Fake Bolsonaro Investigation
U.S. Congress Approves Rescissions Act Cutting Federal Funding for NPR and PBS
North Korea Restricts Foreign Tourist Access to New Seaside Resort
Brazil's Supreme Court Imposes Radical Restrictions on Former President Bolsonaro
Centrist Criticism of von der Leyen Resurfaces as she Survives EU Confidence Vote
Judge Criticizes DOJ Over Secrecy in Dropping Charges Against Gang Leader
Apple Closes $16.5 Billion Tax Dispute With Ireland
Von der Leyen Faces Setback Over €2 Trillion EU Budget Proposal
UK and Germany Collaborate on Global Military Equipment Sales
Trump Plans Over 10% Tariffs on African and Caribbean Nations
Flying Taxi CEO Reclaims Billionaire Status After Stock Surge
Epstein Files Deepen Republican Party Divide
Zuckerberg Faces $8 Billion Privacy Lawsuit From Meta Shareholders
FIFA Pressured to Rethink World Cup Calendar Due to Climate Change
SpaceX Nears $400 Billion Valuation With New Share Sale
Microsoft, US Lab to Use AI for Faster Nuclear Plant Licensing
Trump Walks Back Talk of Firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell
Zelensky Reshuffles Cabinet to Win Support at Home and in Washington
"Can You Hit Moscow?" Trump Asked Zelensky To Make Putin "Feel The Pain"
Irish Tech Worker Detained 100 days by US Authorities for Overstaying Visa
Dimon Warns on Fed Independence as Trump Administration Eyes Powell’s Succession
Church of England Removes 1991 Sexuality Guidelines from Clergy Selection
Superman Franchise Achieves Success with Latest Release
Hungary's Viktor Orban Rejects Agreements on Illegal Migration
Jeff Bezos Considers Purchasing Condé Nast as a Wedding Gift
Ghislaine Maxwell Says She’s Ready to Testify Before Congress on Epstein’s Criminal Empire
Bal des Pompiers: A Celebration of Community and Firefighter Culture in France
FBI Chief Kash Patel Denies Resignation Speculations Amid Epstein List Controversy
Air India Pilot’s Mental Health Records Under Scrutiny
Google Secures Windsurf AI Coding Team in $2.4 Billion Licence Deal
Jamie Dimon Warns Europe Is Losing Global Competitiveness and Flags Market Complacency
South African Police Minister Suspended Amid Organised Crime Allegations
Nvidia CEO Claims Chinese Military Reluctance to Use US AI Technology
Hong Kong Advances Digital Asset Strategy to Address Economic Challenges
Australia Rules Out Pre‑commitment of Troops, Reinforces Defence Posture Amid US‑China Tensions
Martha Wells Says Humanity Still Far from True Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia Becomes World’s First Four‑Trillion‑Dollar Company Amid AI Boom
U.S. Resumes Deportations to Third Countries After Supreme Court Ruling
Excavation Begins at Site of Mass Grave for Children at Former Irish Institution
×