Vice President Kamala Harris' Plan To Crash the Economy

Argentina’s President Javier Milei notes that “if printing money would end poverty, printing diplomas would end stupidity.” Milei’s analysis explains why American prices are too high. Equally clear, his comment underscores why Kamala Harris’ recent price control initiative is unworkable.

Not content with supporting policies that are even worse than those of Joe Biden and not content with overseeing policies that have stoked an inflation inferno that has consumed average Americans’ paychecks, Harris wants to spend more. In order to do so and in order to fund the Green New Deal—a proposal with a projected $52 trillion to $93 trillion price tag and a proposal she strongly supported in 2019—she now wants to impose an unrealized capital gains tax as part of her dangerous plan to tax Americans into oblivion. This stunningly reckless proposal means that Americans would pay taxes on income they have never received.

This latest proposal is part of a $5 trillion list of tax hikes, which she has endorsed. These proposals would (A) raise the small business tax rate to 39%; (B) raise the corporate rate to 28%, a rate that is higher than in communist China and the European Union; (C) would impose a capital gains and dividend tax rate that is higher than communist China, meaning that Californians would face a combined federal-state capital gains tax rate of 59% while taxpayers in New Jersey would face a 55.3% combined rate; and (D) impose a new tax on unrealized gains.

In essence, Kamala Harris seeks to up her commitment to bad economic policies by imposing crushing taxes that would devastate the economy further. She now wants to impose an unconstitutional wealth tax on unrealized gains even though Americans overwhelmingly oppose such a tax, and 76% of Independent voters know that a “gain” isn’t real until it is realized. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris wishes to victimize the American people with an idea that only wild-eyed progressives could love. This proposal could mean that Americans would need to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains on real estate, including their primary residence.

Even if her policy initiative on unrealized gains was limited to the wealthy, we should note the lessons from Norway, which has already introduced this policy. After this unintelligent policy was imposed in Norway, it led to an exodus of over 30 individual multimillionaires and billionaires in 2022. This flight outpaces the total number of wealthy departures from Norway over the past 13 years combined. Since America is 61 times larger than Norway, applying Norway’s statistics to the United States suggests that America could lose 1,834 wealthy individuals in one year. Stepping into this ideological minefield could crash the economy, accelerate economic decline, and lead to unemployment or underemployment for all.

Everyone should be concerned about this possibility since the Biden-Harris Administration has recently revised its 2024 employment numbers. This revision reduced the total number of jobs added to the economy between April 2023 and March 2024 by 818,000, meaning that the Administration overreported jobs added to the economy by nearly 70,000 per month during the 12-month period. This means that the economy is far weaker and far more precarious than the Biden-Harris regime has reported.

Against the tax-and-spend backdrop that Kamala Harris has embraced, the Congressional Budget Office shows that the Biden-Harris spending explosion over the past four years amounts to $5.9 trillion over pre-pandemic 2019 levels and deficits of $7.7 trillion. This has driven up gasoline prices to a record high of $5.01 per gallon in 2022 and a recent average of $3.53 per gallon. Meanwhile, food prices have risen by more than 20%. The data shows that the overall inflation rate peaked at 9.1%  during June 2022 of the Biden-Harris Administration, while the inflation rate was 1.4% when Donald Trump left office.

At the same time, evidence mounts that the Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Kamala Harris celebrates, is already backfiring, leading to higher prescription drug prices and hampering research on the next treatment or cure for cancer. Indeed, the IRA has driven up Medicare Part D premiums. In reality—despite the desperate attempts of the Biden-Harris Administration to hide the true facts—Part D premiums have skyrocketed by 179%.

Additionally, we would all do well to remember that after U. S. taxpayers heavily funded the discovery of the COVID-19 vaccines and after the Biden-Harris Administration vaccine mandates were imposed despite the shot’s ineffectiveness, Big Pharma raked in $90 billion in profits from the vaccine. Apparently, the Biden-Harris regime favors inflationary profits for some and crushing tax schemes for the rest of us, even when such policies crash the economy. In essence, all the available evidence indicates that the Biden-Harris Administration favors the few and well connected rather than the interests of rank-and-file Americans.

Evidently, Kamala Harris favors policies that advance the government’s control over the American people, policies that simultaneously diminish Americans’ liberty interest guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Placing a tax on unrealized income is an unconstitutional policy that should spur all Americans to action.