Vice President Kamala Harris is reversing course on another item from her failed 2020 campaign by backing a 28% corporate tax rate, The Post has learned.
The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate is instead backing the same corporate tax rate proposed by President Biden in his 2025 budget released this year, NBC News first reported.
Earlier, Harris supported a 35% corporate tax rate, which was the taxation level until former President Donald Trump signed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, bringing it down to a rate of 21%.
Those tax cuts are set to expire next year.
“As President, Kamala Harris will focus on creating an opportunity economy for the middle class that advances their economic security, stability, and dignity,” said Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson James Singer in a statement.
“Unlike Donald Trump, whose extreme Project 2025 agenda would drive up the deficit, increase taxes on the middle class by $3,900, and send our economy spiraling into recession — her plan is a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share,” Singer added.
The proposed corporate income tax hike comes days after Harris, 59, floated plans to federally ban “price gouging” at grocery stores, expand tax credits for families with children and hand out housing subsidies to first-time home buyers.
Harris has since faced questions from the media about how she would pay for the plans, with the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimating a total increase of $1.7 trillion to the national deficit if all provisions of her proposals were implemented.
The package includes $25,000 in handouts to first-time home buyers for down payments — and up to $6,000 in tax breaks for lower and middle-income families who have a child in their first year of life.
It would also impose “Soviet-style” price controls on groceries that would lead to “disastrous” shortages with “no upside” in terms of decreasing inflation.
“I think it’s a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment,” Harris dodged when answering a reporter in Moon Township, Pa., on Sunday about the total price tag, which would nearly double the projected 2024 budget deficit.
Harris further suggested that the economic package would help with “increasing the tax base,” implying that she would support increasing revenues in that manner on property owners.
Her campaign has nevertheless attacked former President Donald Trump for suggesting a 10% to 20% tariff on all imported goods as a de facto middle-class tax hike.
“She told you it was a mistake to ask how things will be paid for,” Trump campaign adviser Brian Hughes paraphrased in a Monday press conference in Chicago, where the Democratic National Committee is taking place this week.
“I think that’s a good summary of her economic policy,” Hughes said.
Biden’s 2025 budget, which first suggested raising the taxation rate on corporations to 28%, called for as much as $5.5 trillion in tax increases overall — but spent up to $7.3 trillion.
Trump in a June meeting with top American CEOs in Washington, D.C., had suggested bringing the corporate tax rate down to as low as 20%, if he and a Republican-controlled Congress can pass another tax package in 2025.
