Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have very different views on taxes and how the tax law can support families.
Harris advocates strong support for families by investing in the care economy. She has promised to advance paid family leave, affordable child care, care for disabled or aging family members, and health care, which could be funded through a better tax code.
These measures would help all of us care for our families and strengthen our communities. Investing public money in care could also reduce racial and gender pay gaps by increasing the wages of caregivers – who are mostly women and many of them women of color.
Trump’s campaign has remained largely silent on investments in the care economy. But his campaign has signaled that it will support further tax cuts for top earners. Such cuts would increase inequality and reduce the availability of government funds to strengthen the care economy.
We saw this in the 2017 tax law that former President Trump signed. It cut taxes on the wealthiest people and corporations, including reducing the effective tax rate on our largest corporations from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent. It also preserved loopholes that allow some of the wealthiest corporations to avoid taxes on most — if not all — of their profits.
These tax cuts for the super-rich led to huge losses in federal tax revenues and caused the national debt to skyrocket, making it more difficult for the government to finance new investments in things important to families.
Trump has announced that if he is re-elected, he will further reduce corporate taxes – even though some billionaires pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than nurses and teachers.
In contrast, the Biden-Harris administration introduced a minimum corporate tax so that the richest companies no longer had to pay nothing, imposed a modest tax on stock buybacks, and funded the IRS to better collect taxes from corporations. These measures raised revenue for investments in health care and other priorities.
Harris has signaled that she will support raising the corporate tax rate, which is currently at historic lows, and closing loopholes in the future.
Harris and Trump also have different priorities when it comes to taxing families. As a senator, Harris supported a tax credit of $6,000 for married couples and $3,000 for single people in her Lift the Middle Class Act. This would have meant that 88 percent of the tax relief would go to people earning less than $119,000.
Harris may not support this specific plan in the future, but it suggests she wants to direct benefits to middle earners rather than the wealthiest. She recently proposed increasing the child tax credit and adding a $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns.
In contrast, the tax law Trump signed gave more than half of its benefits to the top 5 percent of households – those with incomes above $263,000. (Like Harris, Trump’s vice presidential nominee JD Vance has also proposed increasing the child tax credit. But Vance has also floated the idea of making people without children pay more taxes.)
Taxing the richest and big corporations would encourage investment in care and make our tax code fairer. Strengthening the care infrastructure would help us all succeed and strengthen the economy. But we need to raise enough revenue to support these transformative measures.
There is strong public support for better health care and fairer taxes. Tax justice advocates should call on both the Harris and Trump campaigns to push for a fairer tax system—and to invest the money it raises in the child care, elder care, and health care our families need.
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Amy Hanauer is executive director of Citizens for Tax Justice. This commentary was published by OtherWords.org.
