Prices continue to rise, and it is putting pressure on most Americans. Kamala Harris won’t admit that, having unleashed inflation through $7 trillion in annual spending, she herself is a major source of this “gouging.” Instead, she deflects attention by accusing Big Corporations of charging too much, and she proposes a national price control board with the authority to limit price increases — a sure road to disaster.
Harris is right about price increases during her administration, even if, as in the Emperor’s New Clothes, she can’t see that she herself is the problem. According to Kelley Blue Book, there has been an “amazingly rapid rate” of price increases on new and used cars over the past four years — or since Biden and Harris took office. The average price increase for new vehicles was under $1,800 in 2019 under President Trump; it exploded to $6,220 in 2021 under Biden/Harris.
The same is true of most other goods and services: groceries, housing, insurance, medical costs, education, maintenance, and the like. Americans rank inflation and the economy as their top concern in this year’s election. Many like me believe that there must be gouging somewhere, even if grocers claim that their margins are under 2% and restaurants claim they are losing money (with Wendy’s biggest franchisee reportedly going bankrupt). Regardless of such facts, prices are out of control, and the money is going somewhere.
But there is an even greater source of inflation looming over the American people, and it will strike with a vengeance if Kamala Harris is elected with a Democrat Congress. This form of inflation is not the fault of Big Corporations or of greedy billionaires, even if it does constitute a form of gouging. And in this case, it is easy to identify the source of the gouging: once again, Kamala Harris herself.
Harris’s proposed tax increases would be a greater burden on individuals and corporations than any gouging she has already created. After many weeks of campaigning, Harris has finally posted a few sentences on issues on her website, but those sentences are laughably vague: make things better for “middle-class families,” help small business (why not large business as well?), “preserve Social Security and Medicare,” defend our country. All noble sentiments, worthy of a sixth-grade mind. But nothing about the costs of her enormous new entitlements, and nothing specific about who would pay for them and how much.
Harris is completely unforthcoming about the burden her new taxes would impose on middle-class Americans. But over the months, she has let it be known that she plans to gouge another $7 trillion over ten years on top of existing taxes from the American people. There are not very many billionaires in America, and over half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all, so the burden of that tax-gouging will fall on the middle class. Those American families cannot afford a huge new increase in expenses on top of the inflation Harris has already caused.
To begin with, Harris plans to allow the Trump tax cuts to expire, something she can do with no backing from Congress. This increase would constitute the largest single tax increase in American history, and it would affect 80.4% of all Americans, not just “the rich.” According to the Tax Foundation, “the net effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to reduce effective tax rates across income groups. In 2019, the TCJA again expanded the use of several deductions and credits, made the standard deduction more favorable than itemizing, and lowered taxes for most taxpayers.” Ordinary families would be paying an additional $6,000 in federal income taxes once the Trump tax cuts expire in 2025. This is a greater increase than any of the forms of “gouging” that Harris has objected to.
But the expiration of the Trump tax cuts is only the tip of the iceberg. According to credible reports, Harris plans to increase individual marginal rates from 37% to 39.6%, impose a 4% wealth tax on families making more than $100,000, increase capital gains rates from 20% to 28% for affluent households, raise the estate tax, and perhaps institute a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains from current rate of zero. She also intends to impose a financial transaction tax on all stock, bond, and derivative trades.
Along with these increases on individuals, Harris plans a corporate tax increase from the current 21% to 28%, an increase in corporate expenses that would be passed along to American consumers and that would render American corporations noncompetitive relative to foreign producers. Harris also plans to quadruple the current tax on stock buybacks. It goes without saying that these tax increases would cripple the U.S. economy, produce a severe recession, and put Americans’ retirement savings in jeopardy.
Assuming that half of Harris’s new taxes (on top of existing taxes, which are enormous by themselves) would fall on middle-class earners, two-earner middle-class households would be paying an additional $8,740 per household. ($350 billion per year divided by 80 million tax filers equals $4,375, or $8,740 per two-earner household.)
These tax increases are horrible, but even worse are Harris’s plans for how to spend this new government revenue. Nothing is said about balancing the federal budget or reducing existing federal debt. Instead, Harris supports new forms of government entitlements, including $25,000 for first-time home buyers, $50,000 to support small business owners on a “targeted basis” (meaning, I suppose, minorities over others), $6,000 per year for child support, trillions perhaps in proposed slavery reparations, canceled college debt, increased benefits for illegal aliens, and what may be a universal income for all regardless of work.
Harris’s spending plans have been called “socialist,” but they are far worse than that. By seizing a large share of income from middle-class Americans and redistributing it to those who have not worked, Harris would be engaging in a form of authoritarianism that resembles Stalin’s re-directing of food and other resources to his supporters and deliberate starvation of the tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians who opposed him, including the kulaks.
The seizure and redistribution of resources is the most fundamental methodology of communist rulers, and, presumably with the help of her Marxist professor father, Harris appears to have studied this methodology well, even if she is tight-lipped about her intentions. Given the chance, she will drain resources from the white middle class and distribute them to her political clientele: a combination of poor blacks and wealthy college-educated liberals. She is a greater threat than Obama and Biden were because she appears to be steeped in Marxist ideology and tactics. Obviously, she is furtive about her motives, but her ultimate intent appears to be racial and class recrimination and reparations.
If Kamala Harris is elected with the support of a Democrat Congress, we may see a period of tax-gouging like nothing in American history, and with it a redistribution of wealth away from the middle class to blacks and progressive apparatchiks. In the long run, all Americans, even those who are lusting for recrimination and reparations, should fear Kamala Harris because she would weaken the American economy and reduce our ability to defend our nation against its enemies. The only way to avoid almost immediate tax-gouging is to defeat Harris in November.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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