The vice president, who campaigned on Wednesday in New Hampshire, has pitched new tax plans that represent a break from President Biden, and that are meant to reassure business owners.
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Campaigning on Wednesday in North Hampton, N.H., Vice President Kamala Harris said that “when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.”
Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday stepped up her efforts to win over the business community, rolling out her plan for an expanded tax break for start-ups and announcing that she would tax investment income less aggressively than President Biden had proposed.
The new tax positions represent the most policy distance she has put between herself and Mr. Biden.
He had proposed taxing capital gains at 39.6 percent for Americans who make more than $1 million a year. Ms. Harris said on Wednesday that she would tax investment income for those Americans at a rate of 28 percent, a reversal from her earlier support for the tax increases included in the White House budget released this spring.
“If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28 percent under my plan,” Ms. Harris said at a campaign event in North Hampton, N.H. “Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.”
Ms. Harris’s proposed rate of 28 percent does not include an additional surtax on investment income, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s proposal. One of those people said a 5 percent surtax would apply on top of the 28 percent, bringing the total rate to 33 percent. With the surtax, Mr. Biden’s proposal would have raised the top capital-gains rate to 44.6 percent. The top capital-gains tax rate now is 23.8 percent, inclusive of a 3.8 percent surtax.
The ideas follow what had been an effort by Ms. Harris to coast largely on Mr. Biden’s agenda during the opening weeks of her campaign. She had sought to take credit for what she says are his successes while offering an array of plans to combat higher prices and inflation, problems that voters have tended to hold Mr. Biden at least partly responsible for.
In addition to her policy shift, Ms. Harris tiptoed away from the language Mr. Biden had used during his re-election campaign, arguing that she was running not only to block former President Donald J. Trump from returning to office but to usher in an agenda that would excite her voters.
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Source: nytimes.com
