Vice President Kamala Harris revealed a comprehensive proposal involving a substantial $5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade this week, but her plan immediately encountered intense criticism.
The proposal, which aligns with Joe Biden’s spring budget, aims to generate billions by taxing everything from corporate profits to unrealized capital gains. However, CNBC’s co-hosts made it clear that the proposal is far from a sure thing.
During a Wednesday segment, hosts Becky Quick and Joe Kernan sharply criticized Harris’s economic advisor, Bharat Ramamurti, calling the idea of taxing unrealized gains “nothing short of lunacy.”
“Unrealized gains, taxing unrealized gains just doesn’t seem fair in any sense of the word,” Quick said 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 one that the hosts expected — and it fell flat. “I think this reaction to unrealized gains is a little funny,” he 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.”
Quick fired back, “The value of your home never moves the way a stock moves, the way something else moves.”
Ramamurti then attempted to justify the tax to fund essential services, claiming it would “create more opportunities” and ensure “every newborn in this country gets $6,000.”
But the co-hosts weren’t buying it, and Kernan summed up the proposal this way: “It’s probably unconstitutional, and it was never in anyone’s intent to do.” He added: “And it’s never going to happen. Not in my life. Not in Becky’s life.”
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Last week, Kernen expressed doubts similar to those of Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren during a discussion of Harris’s plan to lower food prices. The VP has proposed to impose a federal ban on so-called “price gouging” on groceries, which has faced significant opposition.
“If you lose The Washington Post as a Democrat, you got some serious problems. This is what they said about the price gouging, or the price control legislation,” Kernen said during the contentious segment. “It was really pilloried from both sides of the aisle … I can paint you a picture how that would work and how it’s worked in the past, where we’ve tried to artificially hold prices down. Competition doesn’t come in.
Like if beef is too high, people don’t move the chicken. Competitors don’t come in to undercut where the beef prices are. Nothing works when you try to artificially control prices. It’s just the supply and demand issue. It’s a flawed idea,” he explained.
