Kamala Harris, with the top spot on the Democratic ticket assured her, has been busy making her vice presidential pick (announced today as Minnesota's Gov. Tim Walz) and gearing up to campaign in the "battleground" states, without spending much time laying out her tax positions — but experts say her track record is clear enough to surmise her position on a number of issues.
"People are looking at what she did while she was in the Senate, and on the campaign trail in 2019 and in 2020," said Caroline Bruckner, tax professor at American University's Kogod School of Business and chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
And of course, as a member of the Biden administration, she supported the Inflation Reduction Act, adopted in 2022, and the Green Book budget proposals. The Green Book proposes to not raise taxes on any taxpayer making $400,000 per year or less, which is a sensible-sounding goal, but one that might be difficult to design, according to policy experts.
"It's fair to say that companies are bracing for an increased corporate tax rate," said Bruckner. "In looking back to what she proposed in some of her other policies, they are consistent with where Democrats have been, but what is interesting is that in 2019 and 2020 she proposed a massive refundable tax credit as an antipoverty measure. Biden actually did that by increasing the refundability of the Child Tax Credit. Now they have data that shows how successful that was. It's a big change from just talking about child poverty and combating it."
"The Child Tax Credit is a real opportunity for her to tout the success of the refundable tax credit," said Bruckner. "It was an essential part of her tax proposal in 2019, and the Biden administration was actually able to do that with the credit. There was a bipartisan proposal just sitting there that was passed by the House earlier this year which would have expanded the credit."
The bill failed in a procedural vote of 48-44 in the Senate. It required 60 votes to advance.
"It's also interesting to consider her strong connections to the tax community in California," she continued. It is believed that the policies of a potential Harris administration will be reflected in support for Silicon Valley. They will be different from the Biden administration because of where she's from, according to Bruckner.
With the upcoming 2026 sunsetting of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions approaching, a priority for an incoming administration will be to decide whether to allow them to expire or attempt to revive some of them.
"The question is what to extend and how to pay for it," said Bruckner. "The most likely 'pay-for' is an increase in the corporate tax rate. No one expected it to stay so low for so long. It's an exciting time because there's the opportunity to have a vigorous debate over tax and consider some of the successful tax policies that the Biden administration was able to put through. The entire Inflation Reduction Act was a signature piece of legislation that was aimed at combating climate change through the Tax Code."
