President Biden’s spot at the top of the Democratic ticket has been the focus of lively debate. But even if he remains the Democratic nominee, one thing is certain: Vice President Kamala Harris has opened a new chapter in her political career. Questions about Biden’s staying power will persist throughout this year’s campaign and into any hypothetical second term. That will keep the spotlight on Harris.
What does she think about taxes?
Broadly speaking, anyone happy with Biden’s approach to tax policy will find much to like in Harris’s political history. On the margin, Harris may be a bit more progressive in certain respects, especially when it comes to middle- and working-class income support. She is every bit the political pragmatist that Biden is, prepared to compromise when political realities make it necessary. But she is also an implacable foe of many key GOP tax priorities, including extension of many marquee provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Being Vice President
Like most vice presidents, Harris has been studiously ignored during most of her time in office. That sort of invisibility (and limited power) comes with the job.
During the 19th century, vice presidents were only notionally linked to the executive branch. Most spent their days presiding over the Senate, embracing the Constitution’s provision that the vice president serves as the chamber’s president.
Some, like John Adams, took the legislative job seriously, whipping votes and lobbying on key issues. Others, like John C. Calhoun, focused on procedural and parliamentary issues. And a third group was inclined to take it easy; in the delicate words of the Senate official history, they were “less engaged with the daily work of the Senate.” At least one vice president found time for literary pursuits: Ulysses S. Grant’s second vice president, Henry Wilson, spent his term writing a three-volume history of the battle to defeat slavery. He then died while in his Capitol office, still technically on the job.
The office of vice president began to change in the 1920s when President Warren G. Harding invited Calvin Coolidge to attend regular Cabinet meetings. “The vice presidency shifted dramatically in the middle of the 20th century from being mainly a legislative position to a predominately executive branch post,” explains the Senate history page. “Vice presidents represented their presidents’ administrations on Capitol Hill, served on the National Security Council, chaired special commissions, acted as high-level representatives of the government to foreign heads of state, and assumed countless other roles at the president’s direction.”
New duties notwithstanding, the vice presidency remained a backwater, much to the dismay of its occupants. John Nance Garner — who left his post as speaker of the House to become Franklin Roosevelt’s No. 2 — famously dismissed his new post as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” (By most modern accounts, Garner actually invoked a different bodily fluid to underscore his opinion of the job.)
Macabre Reality
So why do people agree to serve as vice president? Despite its shortcomings, the office has never been short of willing occupants. Some vice presidents have treated the job as a stepping stone to the Oval Office, although the record on that has been notably mixed. Of the 51 people who have served as vice president, just 15 have gone on to become president (including Biden, of course).
The vice presidency was an especially poor route to the top in the 19th century. “Of the 21 individuals who held that office from 1805 to 1899, only Martin Van Buren was subsequently elected president,” the Senate history notes. “Four others succeeded to the presidency when the incumbent died, none of whom later won election.”
But there we have it: the macabre appeal of the No. 2 spot. With the vice president just “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, there’s a decent chance that death will deliver the presidency to a patient politician. Eight vice presidents have ascended to the presidency upon the death of a sitting president. If we include Gerald Ford — who arrived in the Oval Office after Richard Nixon’s political, if not physical, demise — then nine vice presidents have successfully used the job as a stepping stone in this way.
All of which underscores the continuing relevance of Kamala Harris. If Biden manages to win his race for a second term, he’ll be 86 before he leaves the White House for good. That fact — and the actuarial uncertainties surrounding it — will keep attention on Harris, regardless of Biden’s performance in future debates, speeches, or unscripted public encounters.
A Rough Ride
As noted, Harris has been mostly ignored by the media during her term as vice president. When she has garnered public attention, it’s usually been for all the wrong reasons. Polls have suggested for years that Harris remains relatively unpopular, although her boss has given her a run for her money. Critics have also suggested repeatedly that Democrats would be better off with someone else on the ticket (Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “Some Democrats Are Worried About Harris’s Political Prospects,” The Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2023).
But over the last couple of weeks, Harris has emerged as the only realistic alternative to Biden. And for what it’s worth, she seems to fare better than most other Democrats when polled against former President Trump in a hypothetical matchup.
All of which suggests that Harris is worth keeping an eye on, especially when it comes to hot-button political issues like taxation. If she somehow finds herself atop the ticket — or even in the Oval Office, should a tragedy unfold now or during a Biden second term — Harris will be calling the shots on tax policy. Specifically, she will be front and center in arguments over extending provisions of the TCJA. Plus, she would presumably develop her own tax agenda.
What would that agenda contain? Harris’s past may hold some clues to her future.
Tax Credits
Back when Harris got the vice president nod in 2020, Tax Notes reporter Jonathan Curry summarized her views: “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his newly announced selection for vice president, former rival and California Sen. Kamala D. Harris, have a lot in common when it comes to preferred tax policies,” he wrote. (Prior coverage: Tax Notes Federal, Aug. 17, 2020, p. 1308.) While she never developed a comprehensive tax plan during her own campaign for the Democratic nomination (she left the race in December 2019, limiting her time for policy formulation), Harris revealed a few ideas that seem broadly consistent with Biden’s priorities.
As a candidate, Harris was closely associated with one particular tax proposal: the LIFT the Middle Class Act. The acronym stood for “Livable Incomes for Families Today,” underscoring the act’s focus on targeted income support. The LIFT proposal would have provided an annual refundable tax credit matching up to $3,000 in earnings for single people and $6,000 for married couples. The credits would phase out as income increased, disappearing entirely at $50,000 (for singles) and $100,000 (for couples).
In 2020 the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimated that the package would distribute $2.7 trillion in benefits over a 10-year budget window. Designed to operate in conjunction with the earned income tax credit, it would deliver maximum benefits to as many people as possible (subject to the income cap).
“The proposed LIFT Act tax credit is similar to the earned income tax credit: Benefits phase in with earnings, reach a maximum, and then phase out,” explained Elaine Maag, Tax Policy Center senior fellow. “Benefits for the LIFT Act phase in at a rate of 100 percent — for each dollar of earnings, workers qualify for a dollar of tax credit. This relatively steep phase-in means that almost all low-income workers would receive the maximum credit, even if they work part-time or part-year.”
The LIFT Act was designed to ease tax burdens at the lower end of the income scale — in fairly dramatic fashion. As the Tax Foundation observed in 2018, it would “greatly increase the progressivity of the tax code by raising the after-tax income of the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers by 20.5 percent. Overall, taxpayer after-tax income would rise by 2.4 percent.”
For Maag, that sort of progressive impact revealed something important about Harris: her “longstanding commitment to increasing the incomes of low- and middle-income workers.” Such a commitment would almost certainly show up during a Harris presidency. The LIFT Act remains her most important — and fully conceptualized — venture into tax policy.
Paying for It
Like Biden, Harris has long supported the elimination of several key TCJA provisions. Indeed, her LIFT proposal included a plan to repeal all provisions of the TCJA except those delivering tax relief to people earning less than $100,000 annually.
Notably, Harris was vague about the specifics of rolling back TCJA provisions. “Because Senator Harris has not specified which provisions of the TCJA she would repeal,” observed the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “it is impossible to estimate the revenue implications of the LIFT Act with total certainty.” But the group was dubious that TCJA repeal could pay for the steep cost of Harris’s signature LIFT plan: “It would require an aggressive interpretation of TCJA repeal in order to raise close to $3 trillion in revenue,” the group noted.
In shaping her economic policies, Harris has long tried to frame her tax ideas in progressive but not radical terms. She has avoided calls for a wealth tax, instead emphasizing the incremental nature of smaller, still progressive reforms. As The New York Times has pointed out, the LIFT proposal “allows Ms. Harris to address income inequality while avoiding the anti-Wall Street rhetoric associated with Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts” (Matt Stevens, “Kamala Harris on the LIFT Act,” The New York Times, June 27, 2019).
That’s not to say Harris has managed to avoid antagonizing Wall Street — or that she has even tried. Her proposal for a financial transaction tax drew attacks from across the business community. Harris never provided details about this proposal, but she was pretty clear about the general outline. “I would tax Wall Street stock trades at 0.2 percent, bond trades at 0.1 percent, and derivative transactions at 0.002 percent,” she wrote. “Think of it like this: that’s a $2 fee on a $1,000 trade by investors and big banks.”
Like Biden, Mostly
Over the course of her presidential campaign and senatorial career, Harris has endorsed several other tax reforms, including the taxation of capital gains at regular income rates and unspecified increases in the federal estate tax. But again, these proposals are best viewed as gestures rather than actual plans. Designed to send a message about priorities, they provide clues to her future agenda. But we shouldn’t view them as specific action items.
Generally speaking, Harris is both progressive and pragmatic. She has offered incremental reforms designed to ease the tax burden on lower-income taxpayers while also endorsing efforts to repeal tax cuts that benefit the rich.
This last point may be the most important (and least surprising) when trying to forecast the agenda of a hypothetical Harris administration. Like Biden — and pretty much every other Democrat — Harris is eager to undo key elements of the TCJA, especially reductions in the corporate tax rate. If she finds herself sitting in the Oval Office next year, it’s reasonable to expect that she will fight hard for that sort of progressive priority.