Vice President Kamala Harris is on record calling for raising payroll taxes on workers. It's further evidence that middle class households would pay higher taxes under a Harris White House.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee personally authored a post on Medium during her 2020 presidential bid endorsing the creation of two additional payroll taxes as part of her "Medicare for All" plan. In her plan, Harris proposes a 7.5% payroll tax on employers and a 4% payroll tax on households with a combined income over $100,000 to be directly withheld from an employee’s paycheck.
Accounting for existing payroll taxes, Harris’s plan would mean that a household earning $100,000 or more would now pay a total combined rate of 26.8% in federal payroll taxes, a major increase from the current combined payroll tax rate of 15.3% . Harris’s payroll tax would further reduce the take-home pay of workers who have seen their real wages and benefits decline by 3.6% due to inflation since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.
While Democrats like to hide the ball on the cost of payroll taxes by imposing them on employers, it is workers who pay the full cost. As the Tax Foundation states, “While payroll taxes are legally imposed partially or wholly on employers, employees effectively pay almost the entire tax, instead of splitting the burden with their employers.” In fact, roughly two-thirds of taxpayers already pay more in federal payroll taxes than they do in personal income taxes when including the employer share of payroll taxes, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation .
The toll of Harris’s payroll tax on the middle class received criticism from rival Democrats upon its rollout and drew comparisons to the plan of self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Harris herself even credits Sanders as the inspiration for her tax hike while explaining the different income thresholds of their respective plans. Here’s Harris describing her tax increase in her own words:
“Sen. Sanders, for example, has put forward a number of ways to help pay for his Medicare for All plan, including an income-based premium paid by employers, higher taxes on the top 1%, taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income, among others. I think these are good options. … However, one of Sen. Sanders’s options is to tax households making above $29,000 an additional 4% income-based premium. I believe this hits the middle class too hard.
"That’s why I propose that we exempt households making below $100,000, along with a higher income threshold for middle-class families living in high-cost areas.”
In response to Harris’s plan in 2019, then-Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield called the plan ”a refusal to be straight with the American middle class, who would have a large tax increase forced on them with this plan.” Bedingfield went on to serve as the Biden-Harris administration’s White House communications director.
The Biden campaign was right to slam Harris’s payroll tax hike for hitting the middle class.
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 37.5% of all U.S. households earn over $100,000, meaning more than 49 million American households would be hit by Harris’s tax increase.
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There is no evidence that Harris has ever retracted her support for her payroll tax proposal. The Harris campaign failed to provide comment in recent reporting covering the details of her plan.
Harris’s payroll tax proposal, written in her own hand, is evidence that she has no problem raising taxes on the middle class and directly contradicts empty campaign promises that she won’t raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year.
Mike Palicz is the Director of Tax Policy at Americans for Tax Reform
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