Vice President Kamala Harris, now a presidential candidate, is set to assume the mantle of chief promoter of several tax policy changes enacted during the Biden administration.
It remains to be seen how Harris might deviate from tax proposals originally floated by President Biden before he dropped out of the race and endorsed her on July 21, although there are a few indications. Many policy observers expect her to tout the tax provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 as the campaign heats up.
“I absolutely expect her to take credit for a lot of the wins the Biden-Harris administration has achieved,” Brendan Duke of the Center for American Progress told Tax Notes.
In addition to providing an estimated $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS, the IRA introduced a series of subsidies geared toward clean energy production and the purchase of electric vehicles, while the CHIPS Act provided tax credits for domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. The tax reforms provided the basis for Biden’s Made in America economic agenda.
Duke said Harris has already played a crucial role by traveling across the country to promote those provisions, and he noted her historical alignment with many of Biden’s campaign pledges, such as permanently expanding child tax credits.
“What we know from her time as a senator is she very much prioritizes tax relief for low- and middle-income families, which is a through line with the administration’s push to expand the child tax credit,” Duke said.
Garrett Watson of the Tax Foundation also expects Harris to rely heavily on the administration’s legislative accomplishments.
“There’s a lot of incentive to maintain the continuity, especially with staff. A lot of the Biden folks working in" campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, "are simply moving over to Harris now, so that limits how much you can change things,” Watson told Tax Notes.
However, Watson believes Harris might be even more aggressive than Biden when it comes to raising taxes on corporations and high-income individuals, which Biden has argued is needed to create a tax system that “rewards work, not wealth.”
Watson noted that during Harris's run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she proposed a full repeal of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which would revert the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, higher than Biden’s proposal of 28 percent. Harris also championed a tax increase for those earning over $100,000 to pay for a more expansive Medicare program, which is a significantly lower threshold than Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000.
“It remains to be seen whether she is interested in returning to those proposals,” Watson said.
Harris, speaking in Milwaukee July 23 after securing enough delegates for the Democratic presidential nomination, took aim at former President Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, and his alleged involvement in Project 2025, which calls for all tax provisions in the TCJA to be made permanent and effectively rescinds the funding boost the IRS got as part of the IRA.
“We are not going back,” Harris said.