Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
Kamala Harris’ economic plan is taking shape, starting with $5 trillion in new taxes—because Washington clearly does not have enough money to spend.
In the past fortnight alone, Harris has promised to hike taxes on small businesses to 39.6% and hike taxes on capital gains and dividends to a top rate of 44.6%—the highest in history, even beating the communist-adjacent Jimmy Carter.
Since taxing half your life savings doesn’t come close to keeping Washington fed, she also wants to hike the corporate rate by a third to 28%. That would take us from one of the best places in the world to do business to one of the worst. We’d be worse than China, Canada, Britain, Russia, even the European Union.
A company would literally make money moving to Canada. And for so-called strategic sectors, our tax rate would be double the rate in China.
Note that workers are the ones who actually pay corporate income tax. A Tax Foundation study found that they pay around 70% of them in the form of lower wages. The rest is paid by shareholders in lower retirement returns and customers in higher prices. Yes, the same high prices she’s blaming on “price gouging.”
The fun doesn’t stop there.
Harris is also calling for a second death tax, something called “step-up basis” that would treat death as a taxable event. So, not only would the family business or farm have to pay estate taxes when it’s passed on, it would be taxed as if all the assets were sold, with up to 44.6% going to the government on top of the death tax.
Finally, the big one: Harris’ handlers are pushing for something we’ve never taxed in this country: unrealized gains. As in a bureaucrat pretends you sold all your stock and the family farm when you didn’t and sends you a bill anyway.
Like all new taxes, this one is being sold as only hitting the rich, but in reality, it will hit family businesses and farms. Moreover, I mentioned in a recent video how the income tax itself started by only hitting the top 1% at a top rate of 7%—and yet here we are today, with more tax returns than people in this country and a top rate of—if Harris gets her way—44.6%.
Incidentally, Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains by a factor of 3 to 1. Seventy-six percent of independents oppose it.
It’s also worth noting Europeans have tried this kind of wealth tax over and over, and every time, it’s failed. The actual rich just move their money and hire better tax lawyers, while small business gets wiped out. Norway, for example, expected to collect $150 million per year from its wealth tax, but instead $54 billion fled the country, taking $600 million of taxes with it.
So, what’s next?
Barely a month into Harris’ presidential candidacy, she’s already far to the left of even President Joe Biden. And keep in mind, this is before the election, when they try not to sound crazy.
We can only imagine what’s coming after the election.
Like drinking radiator coolant, government spending always tastes sweet in the beginning. The stimulus checks, the trillion dollars for green energy, and this week’s war are all painless blips on a debt chart.
Then comes the payback: First, the inflation; then, the taxes that amount to wholesale confiscation of your retirement, of a financial future for the young—all while gutting what’s left of the productive economy.
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