Kamala Harris, As Both Senator and Vice President, Has a Strong Record on Tax Reform

Harris began her career in the Senate with a “no” vote against the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law, a measure heavily slanted towards the wealthy.

By William Rice

Kamala Harris has pursued progressive tax reform all through her national political career, both as vice president and before that as United States senator. Her record demonstrates an understanding that the best way to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top, is to start with a fairer tax system. 

Harris began her career in the Senate with a “no” vote against the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law, a measure heavily slanted towards the wealthy. The next year, she introduced her own tax plan, one that was just as heavily slanted the other way: towards working families. Her Living Incomes for Families Today (LIFT) Act would have offered refundable tax credits of up to $6,000 per couple to low- and middle-income families. Almost all the benefits would have gone to households making less than $87,000 a year. 

Harris was also a co-sponsor of two bills that would improve existing tax credits that help low-income workers and parents get by and get ahead: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC).

In 2019, she became one of just four co-sponsors of a bill authored by her senate colleague Bernie Sanders (D-VT) that would have improved Social Security benefits for low-income families by closing a loophole that exempts the highest-salaried employees from payroll taxes on most of their income. The plan would also have almost tripled (from 3.8% to 10%) the tax wealthy investors pay on their passive income, which is entirely exempt from payroll taxes. 

That same year she introduced a bill to lower housing costs by giving a tax credit to tenants who pay over 30% of their income in rent. 

The Vice President’s dedication to tax fairness has accelerated in her role as one-half of the Biden-Harris White House, the administration with the most progressive tax-reform record in modern American history. 

In 2022, the Biden-Harris team succeeded in getting Congress to enact the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). In addition to being the largest-ever investment in green energy to combat the climate crisis and lowering Medicare drug prices, the IRA was noteworthy for paying for its initiatives with fairer taxes on big corporations and their wealthy investors, and with improved tax administration. 

The IRA imposed a minimum tax on the nation’s largest corporations, some of which otherwise get away with paying little or nothing some years despite huge profits. It also created a tax on corporate stock buybacks, a wasteful Wall Street practice that further enriches already wealthy CEOs and other shareholders by artificially inflating stock prices at the expense of improved worker wages and long-term business investment. And it restored funding to the IRS so it can catch more rich tax cheats and provide better customer service to honest taxpayers. 

Over the past three-and-a-half years, the Biden-Harris team has consistently put forward even broader and deeper tax reforms. 

Biden and Harris have attacked the central injustice of the tax code by trying to tax wealth more like work. To end the scandal of big-time stock-market gamblers paying lower tax rates than emergency-room nurses and power-line workers they’ve proposed eliminating the tax-rate discount on large investment incomes. To curb the growth of economic family dynasties, they’ve wanted to close the loophole that makes substantial inherited investment gains magically disappear for tax purposes. 

Despite the progress on corporate-tax reform represented by the IRA, the Biden-Harris team knows that huge multinational firms still don’t pay their fair share to the nation that helps make their success possible. That’s why they’ve tried to raise the corporate tax rate; narrow the difference between what corporations pay in U.S. taxes on their foreign profits versus their domestic earnings; and end incentives for American companies to shift profits and ship jobs offshore. 

Biden and Harris understand that billionaires and other hyper-wealthy people make their money differently than ordinary workers and that our income-tax system is therefore not equipped to tax them fairly. That’s why despite their staggering wealth, some billionaires can go years without paying any federal income tax at all. The Biden-Harris team has proposed a new kind of tax on the nation’s handful of wealthiest households that ensures they pay on their single largest source of income—unrealized capital gains, which are now tax-exempt—if necessary to satisfy a minimum tax.  

Vice President Kamala Harris has shown a strong record on tax fairness to date. The plans she has advocated for and–as part of the Biden-Harris administration–actually enacted, are strong steps toward creating a tax code that works for everyone.