What We Know About Trump and Harris’ Tax Plans

What We Know About Trump and Harris’ Tax Plans

As the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump head into the November elections, both candidates are focusing heavily on new tax proposals to appeal to their bases and win over undecided voters.

While both candidates are pushing populist tax proposals, their starkly different tax plans reveal they have sharply divergent views on how to spur economic growth and prosperity at a time when many Americans are concerned about their ability to meet basic needs like food and housing.

Harris proposes policies like raising taxes on corporations and creating new tax credits, while Trump promises to impose new tariffs and cut taxes for certain businesses. There’s not much the two agree on, other than a proposal to eliminate federal taxes on tips.

As president, either candidate would struggle to implement their promised changes unilaterally, since taxes are controlled by Congress, not the executive branch. Neither party appears poised to make the massive gains in either the House or the Senate that a president would need to ram his agenda through Congress, and it’s possible that control could remain divided between parties, a recipe for gridlock.

That makes these plans more about demonstrating an economic philosophy to voters than anything else. On economics, Trump has trailed both of his Democratic challengers in the polls, and that dominance has proven difficult for Democrats to break; according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, Trump leads Harris on the economy by 13 percentage points.

Harris largely follows the path laid out by Biden

As vice president, Harris is trying to strike a balance between supporting the Biden administration’s policies and distinguishing herself where it makes political sense to do so. She’s essentially trying to chart a path that appeals to progressive Democrats demanding higher taxes, wealthy Democratic donors worried about higher taxes, and everyone in between.

So far, Harris has said she wants the following:

  • Set the capital gains tax rate at 28 percent
  • Set the corporate tax rate at 28 percent
  • Give new small businesses a tax break of up to $50,000
  • Create a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers
  • Increase child benefits for all parents, including giving a $6,000 tax credit to new parents
  • Eliminate certain taxes on tips
  • Ensure that no tax increases are implemented for individuals earning less than $400,000

Democrats have pushed for some of the changes above for years. For example, Biden has proposed raising the capital gains tax — essentially a tax on profits made by selling something that increases in value over time, like stocks or gold — to 39.6 percent. The current rate is 20 percent, meaning Harris’ proposed rate would be an eight percentage point increase. Harris’ proposal comes with some limitations: It would exempt income from stock dividends and would only apply to taxpayers earning $1 million or more a year.

Harris’ proposed corporate tax rate — the amount businesses pay on their income — would be a 7 percentage point increase from the current federal rate of 21 percent. That’s in line with Biden’s 2025 budget proposal, as is her proposal for a so-called “billionaires tax” that would impose a 25 percent annual tax on unrealized profits, or the appreciation in the value of unsold assets like stocks, for people with $100 million or more in assets. New small businesses can currently claim a $5,000 deduction on their taxes, and Harris proposes giving them up to 10 times that amount.

The idea here, Harris said, is to make sure “big business pays its fair share.” But she has also won praise for the plan from major Democratic donors: Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor, praised Harris for “going 100 percent to the middle” after she announced the capital gains tax rate. Her proposals aimed at middle-class and low-income Americans reflect a similar, somewhat moderate populism.

Her first-time homebuyer subsidy is intended to make homeownership accessible to more people, and she has promised to revive a popular pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit. Harris’ plan would give parents of newborns a $6,000 tax deduction, those with children ages 2 to 5 up to a $3,600 tax credit, and families with children ages 6 to 17 up to $3,000. Like Trump, Harris has promised to eliminate taxes on tips, but in a more limited way than her rival: The vice president’s plan would eliminate federal income taxes on tips, but Medicare and Social Security taxes would still be deducted from tips.

Finally, Harris would keep individual income tax rates the same, except for Americans making more than $400,000 a year. Americans currently in the highest tax bracket would see their income tax rate return to the 39.6 percent they had before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts (down from 37 percent now), and would also pay more in Medicare taxes.

Ostensibly, higher capital gains and corporate taxes would help offset the revenue lost from Harris’ planned tax breaks. The proposed increase in the child tax credit would cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years, and her housing credit plan would cost an estimated $100 billion; all told, Harris’ proposal would increase the federal deficit by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget.

Trump’s plans target corporations and the super-rich

Trump’s tax message was less about striking a balance and more about maximalism: lower taxes for corporations, use taxes to promote his “America First” ideology and go further on populist promises than Democrats.

So far, Trump says he plans to:

  • Reduce part of the corporate tax to 15 percent
  • Impose a tariff of up to 20 percent on all imports (except those from China, which face a 60 percent tariff)
  • Extend the 2017 individual tax cuts, leaving even the highest income tax brackets at their current levels
  • Eliminate taxes on social security benefits
  • End the tip tax

In his first term, Trump oversaw a significant overhaul of the U.S. tax code, which included lowering the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. Now he says that rate should be even lower — just 15 percent — for companies that plan to manufacture in the United States.

Trump also plans to revisit and expand another idea from his first term: tariffs. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on Chinese imports backfired, sparking a trade war with China. This time around, he says he’d like to see tariffs of up to 60 percent on goods imported from China, and up to 20 percent on all other imported goods. (Trump has also reportedly considered eliminating income taxes altogether and raising tariffs enough to offset the losses such a policy would generate.)

Trump has made protecting American manufacturing a central theme in his campaign, but some economists believe his tariff policies could ultimately harm American consumers.

“We should just call them taxes on imports, because that’s what they are,” Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, told Vox. “We import $4 trillion worth of goods every year. So that’s a $400 billion tax increase. That’s a really significant hit that goes overwhelmingly to middle-income people, the middle class,” since the ultra-rich are more likely to spend their money abroad and on things other than consumer goods.

On the individual front, Trump has promised to extend his 2017 individual tax cuts. Again, Harris wants to extend them for everyone except the top earners; Trump would extend them to all Americans, regardless of income. (Since these cuts all expire in 2025, Congress will have to figure out what to do with these tax cuts regardless of who wins.)

Trump has also proposed eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors, which could save an individual about $560 a year. But that could cost up to $1.8 trillion and further jeopardize the Social Security fund, which is set to run out in 2035.

Unlike Harris, Trump has not specified how his policy to eliminate the tip tax would work. However, assuming tips were exempt from all taxes, his plan could cost $250 billion through 2035.

Vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested increasing the child benefit by $5,000 per child in an interview with CBS, but Trump has not yet endorsed that position.

Like Harris, it’s not immediately clear how Trump would pay for these changes, which could cost as much as $7 trillion over 10 years. He has suggested creating a commission, possibly headed by his billionaire ally Elon Musk, to tackle waste, and has proposed creating a sovereign wealth fund — essentially a national investment fund — similar to those in Saudi Arabia and China, which Trump has said would fund “a grand national effort,” pay down the national debt and finance infrastructure projects — something that would normally be done with tax revenues and congressional appropriations.