As Kamala Harris begins to reveal her economic agenda, companies are bristling and pushing back.
Former White House economist Kevin Hassett told Fox Business that a Harris presidency could “shut down” the economy.
“My guess is that a lot of the things she said in the past about what she really wants to do, like the Green New Deal, for example … getting carbon-neutral by 2030 – all that kind of stuff would cause a deep recession toward carbon,” Hassett said.
Her recent plan to tackle “price gouging” has drawn the ire of many companies, who suggest that her understanding of the situation and approach to resolving it are overly simplistic.
“We understand why there is this sticker shock and why it’s upsetting,” Andy Harig, vice president at FMI, told Fox Business. “But to automatically just say there’s got to be something nefarious, I think to us that is oversimplified.”
“The proposal calling for a ban on grocery price gouging is a solution in search of a problem,” said the National Grocers Association, explaining that inflation is hitting retailers as well as consumers. One major retailer, Kellanova, said that companies will not survive the current economic climate if they do not preserve their profit margins.
Harris announced on Monday that she intends to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from its current level of 21%, previously enacted by her current opponent, former President Donald Trump. During her 2020 campaign, Harris called for returning the corporate tax rate to 35%.
Fox Business reports on the announcement from the Harris Campaign and the impact it would have. Here’s the start of the story:
Vice President Harris’ economic policy roll out continued Monday as her campaign said that if she wins the presidency she would push to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from its current level of 21%.
Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said the policy 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 U.S. corporate tax rate was 35% when former President Trump, who is now Harris’ main electoral rival for the presidency, and congressional Republicans enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017. The law lowered the corporate tax rate to 21% while also reducing personal income taxes for most taxpayers.
Harris’ proposal aligns with President Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025 that was released earlier this year and had the corporate tax rate rising to 28%.
It also represents a departure from the position Harris adopted in her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, in which she called for returning the corporate tax rate to its pre-TCJA rate of 35% to help finance her progressive platform.