In a month that has seen bold tax-policy prescriptions from Rep. Elizabeth Warren (who proposed a wealth tax) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who proposed almost doubling the highest tax bracket), the tax proposal embedded in Senator Harris’ speech at first blush leaves a lot to be desired.
I am running to guarantee working and middle class families an overdue pay increase. We will deliver the largest working and middle-class tax cut in a generation. Up to $500 a month to help America's families make ends meet.
And we’ll pay for it by reversing this administration’s give aways to big corporations and the top one percent. — www.ktvu.com/...
Her website doesn’t go any further, limiting itself to a discussion of “sweeping tax cuts for the middle class”.
Is that it? The plan is to reverse the Trump-Ryan-McConnell tax heist and call it a day? Surely Sen. Harris knows that income inequality had been rising for three decades before Trump.
Why not adopt a bolder stance?
But wait a second.
Though the revenue end of Sen. Harris’ proposal is ho-hum, her expenditure plan is not. The proposal prominently features the term “middle class” in its name and Sen. Harris calls this a “tax cut” in her speech and on her campaign website. But it isn’t just a tax cut, and it goes far beyond the “middle class”. Her LIFT the Middle Class Act would make direct cash transfers to the poorest Americans.
Harris is offering as much as $3,000 a year for a single person or $6,000 a year for a married couple, on top of existing tax and transfer programs, disbursed either as a lump-sum tax refund or as a monthly payment. Working families making less than $100,000 a year would qualify, including those making close to nothing. As many as 80 million Americans would benefit, Harris’s office has estimated, with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculating that the proposal would lift 9 million people out of poverty, including nearly 3 million kids. — www.theatlantic.com/...
This is undeniably a good thing, and would reverse many of the ill-effects of “welfare reform”. It would deliver aid in the form of cash, directly to the people who need it most. I have nothing critical to say about it. More of this please.
If such a bold proposal is to have any hope of becoming law, Sen. Harris will have to advocate for it clearly and frequently. She will need to explain convincingly, to Americans who have imbibed decades of right-wing attacks on “welfare”, why her policy is a good thing.
I hope Sen. Harris makes this the center-piece of her platform and spends more time on it and other progressive policy positions in her speech:
I am running to declare, once and for all, that health care is a fundamental right, and we will deliver that right with Medicare for All!
I am running to declare education is a fundamental right, and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-k and debt free college!
— @subirgrewal