While we angst our way through presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s honeymoon bump, intrusive thoughts of what a Harris presidency would look like run through our heads. And while no one who remembers America before Obama-Biden began to fundamentally transform it would mistake Joe Biden for a moderate, Harris's plans make him look like one.
If she gets into the big chair, Harris wants to spearhead far too many horrible policies to be absorbed in one sitting, so this article will focus on her plan to increase taxes on American corporations.
A lot.
Corporations play the role of bogeymen for America's leftwing redistributionist politicians. Corporations are greedy! They don't pay their fair share! (Never mind that their leadership and staff have become almost uniformly leftist these days.) And not only are corporations greedy and evil, but they are also sitting on a gold mine that will magically turn the United States into a bountiful utopia once it can be pried from their greedy, evil fingers.
In the Obama days, the corporate tax rate ran up to 35%. Then President Donald Trump and Republican legislators collaborated to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and knocked it down to a flat 21% rate. But the TCJA is set to expire at the end of 2025, so the next president will be crucial to what happens next.
Candidate Trump says he'd like to drop the corporate tax rate even further, to 15%. Before dropping out of the 2024 race, Joe Biden campaigned on raising it back up to 28%.
What about Harris? It's possible that she'll fall in line with the old Biden-Harris ticket plan. But then again, when she was running for the Democrat nomination before dropping out in 2019, she proposed pushing that tax rate back up to an eye-watering 35%.
Now compare and contrast that proposal with another controversial policy discussion making the rounds in Washington: tariffs.
For a Republican, Trump was fond of imposing tariffs on imports. We can argue about the wisdom of doing that. Some see tariffs as the enemy of free trade. I agree that would be the case — if we actually had free trade. But it's not a free, level playing field when you’re trading with communist behemoths that use slave labor, espionage, and IP theft to out-compete you.
But at the very least, we should all be able to agree on one thing: It’s mind-bogglingly stupid to apply tariffs to our own American corporations.
Tariffs are, after all, damaging. My PJ Media colleague Christian Josi railed against tariffs in his Tuesday column:
Simply put, if the idea of economic isolationism [author's note: i.e. imposing tariffs on imports] takes root, it could decimate the American economy. A 2022 Cato Institute policy analysis titled “The (Updated) Case for Free Trade” concluded that “the seen and unseen economic benefits that free trade has delivered to countless individuals, businesses, and communities in America are undeniable and irreplaceable” and “the lone alternative to free trade, protectionism, has repeatedly proven to impose high costs for minimal benefits.” Isolating our economy through high taxes for imports, also known as tariffs, and other protectionist policies will make Americans poorer because we will consume less and have less choice of products. Protectionism leads to stagnating growth…
Related: JD Coined the Perfect Slogan for the Mighty Trump-Vance Ticket
Another way of looking at tariffs — which are basically what Harris and Democrats are proposing to saddle our American companies with in the form of higher corporate tax rates — is that they are in reality a tax on Americans.
In a recent report entitled "Tariff Tracker: Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump-Biden Tariffs," the Tax Foundation found:
- The Trump administration imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, amounting to one of the largest tax increases in decades.
- The Biden administration has kept most of the Trump administration tariffs in place, and in May 2024, announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods, including semiconductors and electric vehicles, for an additional tax increase of $3.6 billion.
Obviously, the globalist think tank quoted above is not a Trump fan and phrased its findings to damage him. But the point stands: tariffs are ultimately paid for by the American people.
When a tax is called a tariff, it's understood to be a punitive fee levied on the target with the intention of harming it. Rebranding a tax as making the target pay its "fair share" does nothing to alleviate that harm.
Tariffs may have a role to play in trade policy with hostile, inhumane, thieving foreign nations. It's masochistic to impose them on our own American companies.
But that’s exactly what our brilliant Democrat presidential aspirant wants to do.
