By Jeff Stein
(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to unveil new proposals meant to boost small businesses and entrepreneurs ahead of a campaign speech Wednesday in New Hampshire, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
With days until her first debate with former president Donald Trump, Harris is aiming to draw a contrast with the GOP nominee’s calls for a lower corporate tax rate, the people said. Advisers to the campaign have also discussed including plans to bolster the safety net, such as through child-care or paid leave expansions, alongside tax proposals, although it is unclear whether those or other policies will be in Wednesday’s announcement. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details not yet made public.
The plans will help bring Harris’s economic policy vision into focus as her team tries to assemble a presidential campaign at a breakneck pace since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Harris has thus far largely called for preserving the overall direction of Biden’s policies, which have embraced a more aggressive role for federal intervention in the economy than his recent Democratic predecessors supported. Her first set of economic policy proposals, released last month, struck a populist tone, calling for major new housing subsidies, a $6,000 child benefit for newborns and the first federal ban on price gouging in the grocery and food sectors.
The new focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs, however, is probably aimed in part at reassuring voters who believe Harris is too liberal. Outside advisers to the campaign have eyed a mixture of tax credits and grants, which would aim to counteract the perception that Democrats are bad for business while still criticizing Trump’s corporate tax cut as a break for large firms.
A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment on the upcoming package, the precise contents of which remain unknown. The Harris campaign also released a new campaign advertisement Tuesday, its fourth focused on the economy, attacking Trump for aiming to give tax cuts to corporations.
Roughly 62 million U.S. workers are employed by a “small business,” typically defined as having 500 employees or fewer. The White House has touted record numbers of new business applications during the first three years of the Biden administration, with Black and Latino business ownership growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade. The administration has taken credit for this small-business boom, although the rise of remote work during and after the pandemic also probably played a key role.
“The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented small-business and start-up boom that nobody saw coming,” said John Lettieri, president and chief executive of the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan policy organization. “There’s been precious little from any policymaker to harness this and keep it going.”
Republicans have assailed the Biden administration’s record on business, arguing that its regulatory push through various federal agencies has stifled innovation and growth. The 2017 Trump tax cuts slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, while also cutting individual rates and doubling the standard deduction paid by most taxpayers. Trump has talked about lowering the corporate tax rate again to as low as 15 percent. The 2017 law also created a 20 percent deduction for what are known as S-corporations – including many small businesses – that pass along their corporate income to individuals; that deduction is set to expire in 2025.
It is unclear whether the upcoming policy announcement will detail Harris’s overall vision for the nation’s tax code. The Harris campaign has previously told reporters that it supports the roughly $5 trillion in tax plans outlined in the White House budget. Some outside advisers to the campaign have called for Harris to include versions of the billionaire tax and higher tax on corporations previously endorsed by Biden.
Harris has a large menu to choose from when formulating a policy agenda for bolstering small firms. Her options include targeted tax credits for firms below a certain size; eliminating red tape for new business formation; taxpayer support to the retirement plans of small companies; grants to nonprofit lenders in lower-income and minority communities; and technical support for smaller manufacturers.