Harris proposes raising corporate tax rate to 28% to help pay for campaign promises

By Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris will push to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from the current 21%, her campaign said Monday, the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Coming days after she unveiled a four-part economic package that would provide tax relief to working and middle-class Americans, the corporate tax proposal marks Harris’ first effort to detail how she would pay for her policy platform should she win the presidential election.

“As President, Kamala Harris will focus on creating an opportunity economy for the middle class that advances their economic security, stability, and dignity,” campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement. “Her plan is a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share.”

The rate hike, which is in line with what President Joe Biden has supported but less than the 35% rate that Harris proposed during her 2020 presidential campaign, would reverse a major component of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That law reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35% – and it doesn’t expire, unlike the TCJA’s individual income tax provisions, which lapse after 2025.

Raising the corporate tax rate would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The watchdog group estimates the price tag of Harris’ economic package would be $1.7 trillion over the next decade.

Trump, on the other hand, has said he would cut taxes on businesses, as well as provide relief for Americans. Trump would like to lower the corporate tax rate to as low as 15% – though he acknowledged in an interview last month with Bloomberg Businessweek that reducing it that much would be hard.

Last Friday, Harris proposed a populist economic platform, which includes measures aimed at making housing, groceries, health care and child rearing more affordable. It would provide tax relief for more than 100 million middle-class and lower-income Americans, largely by restoring the American Rescue Plan Act’s enhanced child tax credit and by creating a new $6,000 credit for children in their first year of life.

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