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In a classic example of how political ads mislead viewers by using out-of-context quotes, a TV ad from former President Donald Trump’s campaign cites the New York Times as saying Vice President Kamala Harris “is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” Period, end of sentence. The rest of that sentence in the Times said: “on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
There’s more context that was left on the cutting room floor. The ad twice features a clip of Harris saying, “Taxes are going to have to go up.” In the July 2019 event, Harris actually said, “Estate taxes are going to have to go up for the richest Americans.”
The Trump ad, released Oct. 2, leaves the false impression that Harris has said she wants to broadly raise taxes on all income groups. It assumes, without explicitly saying so, that Harris’ “plan” is to let all of the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire, as they are scheduled to do at the end of 2025. But Harris, who hasn’t detailed how she would handle that expiration, has said she “will make sure no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes” and will “roll back Trump’s tax cuts for the richest Americans,” as her economic policy book says.
The ad has aired in the swing states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, according to AdImpact, a political ad tracking service.
Nearly every citation in the ad is problematic.
The ad begins with the New York Times quote on the screen, citing an Aug. 22 story. An announcer says: “Kamala Harris is going to significantly raise taxes.” But the Times’ story that day said she wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning under $400,000.
New York Times, Aug. 22: No one making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the plan. Instead, Ms. Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.
The ad then shows the truncated clip of Harris saying, “Taxes are going to have to go up.” As we said, the full quote makes a difference. At the July 2019 roundtable event in Davenport, Iowa, when Harris was running for president, she talked about repealing the 2017 tax law, which Trump signed, saying it “represent[ed] the top 1% and the biggest corporations in America.” (As we’ve written, the tax law benefited all income groups on average. In 2018, the top 1% of income earners got 20.5% of the benefits of the tax cuts, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis, but 82% of middle-income earners got a tax cut.)
Harris went on to talk about new tax credits she supported, and she said that “estate taxes” for the “richest Americans” would “have to go up,” not all taxes, as the Trump campaign ad makes it appear.
Harris, Iowa roundtable, July 16, 2019 (at the 15:27 mark): We also have to increase taxes for the top 1%, and that, part of that is going to be about repealing that tax bill they just passed. And also looking at estate taxes are going to have to go up for the richest Americans, and closing certain corporate loopholes, including the carried interest deductible and a number of other things that are about people not reporting income as income and therefore not being taxed on it as income, the way you and I are being taxed.
The Trump ad then claims: “Kamala’s plan will raise families’ taxes by nearly $2,600 a year,” citing the Tax Foundation on May 7. That’s not what the Tax Foundation said.
Instead, the Tax Foundation article analyzed the impact on taxpayers if the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire at the end of 2025, as scheduled. (Republicans wrote the legislation to have most of the individual income tax provisions expire after 2025, so that it could be passed with a simple majority.) “Without congressional action, most taxpayers will see a notable tax increase relative to current policy in 2026,” the Tax Foundation said.
One of the authors of that article, Erica York, senior economist and research director of the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told us: “That is not our analysis of Harris’s tax proposals.” (The ad also cites the figure of $2,580, but the tax policy group estimated the nationwide average tax increase would be $2,853 per taxpayer if the TCJA fully expires.)
The Tax Foundation did publish a preliminary analysis of Harris’ tax proposals on Sept. 10, finding that her plans “would redistribute income from high earners to low earners.”
Among other policies, the analysis included Harris’ proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%; restore the top individual income tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, on income above $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples; increase the long-term capital gains rate to 28% from 20% for households with taxable income of more than $1 million; eliminate taxes on tips for service industry workers; expand the child tax credit, including a $6,000 credit for newborns; and provide eligible first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 in mortgage assistance.
Under Harris’ proposals, the Tax Foundation found: “The bottom 60 percent of earners would see increases in after-tax income in 2025, while the top 40 percent of earners would see decreases. After-tax income for the bottom quintile would increase by 16.5 percent, largely from expanded tax credits. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners would experience a 9.5 percent decrease in after-tax income.”
The Tax Foundation also analyzed Trump’s proposals, and the Tax Policy Center published a guide to the candidates’ tax policies.
We asked the Trump campaign about the TV ad’s inherent claim that Harris would let all of the TCJA expire, given she has pledged not to raise taxes for people earning less than $400,000 a year. Spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told us that Harris had voted against the TCJA and that she “has called for scrapping” the law entirely, “saying the U.S. should ‘get rid of the whole thing.'” The link, however, goes to a May 2019 article in the Hill. Harris did say that at the time, but the Hill reported that her campaign said she wanted to replace the TCJA with “legislation she has proposed that would involve nearly $3 trillion in refundable tax cuts primarily affecting the middle class.”
The TV ad does accurately cite a Sept. 10 CNBC article as saying that prices have gone up 19.4% since the start of the Biden-Harris administration. The cumulative price increase under Trump was 7.8%, according to Consumer Price Index data.
The ad ends by saying Trump “will cut taxes again. No taxes on tips, overtime, or Social Security,” citing another New York Times article. Trump has proposed those ideas, as the Sept. 22 article said. He also has proposed universal tariffs on imported goods — ideas that, the Times said, could move the U.S. away from income taxes and toward a consumption tax on the goods Americans buy.
“Mr. Trump has floated ideas that, taken together, would fundamentally change the way Americans are taxed, eroding the income tax while embracing expansive tariffs as a way to raise federal revenue,” the Times reported.
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