In a week where Vice President Kamala Harris rolled out her most detailed proposal yet — a whopping $5 trillion in tax hikes over the next decade — her plan quickly ran into a buzzsaw of criticism. The proposal, which mirrors Joe Biden’s spring budget, hopes to rake in billions by taxing everything from corporate profits to unrealized capital gains. But if CNBC’s co-hosts are any indication, the pitch is far from a slam dunk.
On Wednesday’s segment, Becky Quick and Joe Kernan took Harris economic advisor Bharat Ramamurti to task, and they didn’t hold back. The crux of their argument? Taxing unrealized gains is nothing short of lunacy.
“Unrealized gains, taxing unrealized gains just doesn’t seem fair in any sense of the word,” Quick fired off during the exchange. “In the very best sense, if you are taxing unrealized gains, all you’re doing is pulling forward the taxes that would be paid later when someone actually sells the stock.”
Ramamurti’s response was a tone-deaf analogy that fell flat with both the hosts and the viewers. “I think this reaction to unrealized gains is a little funny,” Ramamurti said. “The majority of people watching right now are already paying a tax on unrealized gains. It’s called a property tax. When the value of your home goes up, you pay higher taxes even if you don’t sell your home.”
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Quick was quick to clap back: “The value of your home never moves the way a stock moves, the way something else moves,” she countered. The exchange didn’t get much better from there. Ramamurti tried to justify the tax as a way to fund essential services, claiming it would “create more opportunities” and make sure “every newborn in this country gets $6,000.” But the co-hosts weren’t buying it. Kernan summed up the sentiment perfectly: “It’s probably unconstitutional, and it was never in anyone’s intent to do.”
The final nail in the coffin? Kernan’s brutal closing line: “And it’s never going to happen. Not in my life. Not in Becky’s life.”
If Harris’s campaign thought the plan would score political points, they might want to think again. As CNBC’s co-hosts made abundantly clear, taxing Americans on money they haven’t even made yet is a tough sell. Harris has been setting her sights on the rich and the corporate giants, pushing for hefty tax hikes that have previously been shot down by Congress, even when her own party held the reins. And with the economy teetering on the edge, the proposal could be the final straw for many voters.
Tax talk is simmering on the back burner of a heated presidential race but expect it to boil over in Washington next year as a top agenda item. The next commander-in-chief will be grappling with the Trump-era tax slashes set to sunset after 2025, which could see millions of Americans forking over more to Uncle Sam if Congress doesn’t hammer out a new deal. Tagging along with the Biden administration’s push for tax increases, Harris is backing a proposal to quadruple the tax on stock buybacks to 4% from the current 1%, a move Democrats baked into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
