Vice President Kamala Harris has been under scrutiny for her campaign rhetoric since she was handed the Democratic nomination ahead of the November election. While the mainstream media has called out her penchant for missing the mark, the examples are few and far between. The Fourth Estate’s failure to push back against the plethora of claims emanating from the Harris camp seems to have provided her license.
Kamala Harris and Tax Rates
Like her boss, the vice president has repeatedly asserted that wealthy individuals and corporations would pay for her “new way forward” agenda. In a recent 60 Minutes interview that some pundits have purported might have sunk the Kamala Harris campaign, the Democratic presidential candidate reiterated the common claim that billionaires pay lower tax rates than teachers. “It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations. And I plan on making that fair,” Harris told correspondent Bill Whitaker.
Left-leaning politicians, from President Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have peddled the same claim for years. But are the assertions grounded in reality?
If you are fortunate enough to earn more than $609,350 annually, you will pay a tax rate of 37%. This is in addition to the 20% capital gains tax rate, the 3.8% net investment income tax, and myriad other levies. As for corporations, they pay a tax rate of 21%. Yes, the affluent could trim their obligations through clever accounting tricks that are legal within the confines of the tax code. But the meat and potatoes is that high-net-worth folks pay large tax percentages.
How does this compare to the usual suspects exploited for political gain? First, it would be prudent to assess their incomes. The average salary for a K-12 teacher in the United States was $66,397 in the 2021-2022 school year. The median annual wage for registered nurses was $86,070 in 2023. Last year, a firefighter's average salary was slightly more than $55,000. This means they would fall in a federal income tax bracket of 22%. Even if they are married and filing jointly, effectively earning more money, these professionals would still likely reside in lower tax brackets than the millionaires and billionaires.
Moreover, it would be worth pointing out that the top 10% of income earners pay about three-quarters of the country's tax bill.
Small Business Tax Credits
Does Kamala Harris know what a tax credit is? The vice president has proposed expanding the small business tax credit from $5,000 to $50,000. This means that small businesses can deduct, dollar for dollar, from the income taxes they owe. Indeed, any chance entrepreneurs can reduce the confiscatory penalty and concentrate on serving consumers is a win. But there seems to be one problem.
Whether on the campaign trail or in softball press interviews, Harris has repeatedly uttered a confusing line: "You can’t start up any small business with $5,000." This statement suggests that she believes her public policy proposal would force the federal government to write $50,000 blank checks to smaller outfits.
Perhaps some of the members of the media can probe Harris for confirmation. A simple question would suffice: What is a tax credit?
Manufacturing, Unemployment, and the Great Depression
In her first and potentially only debate with former President Donald Trump, Harris claimed that "Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression, when you look at, for example, the employment numbers.” This is wrong.
When the Biden-Harris regime commenced in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, down from the pandemic-era peak of 14.8%. This was even lower than the 7.8% rate when former President Barack Obama took office during the global financial crisis. At the height of the Great Depression, the jobless rate reached 25%.
As Liberty Nation News recently reported, Harris also presented a claim that Trump lost 200,000 jobs before the COVID-19 public health crisis. "From January 2017 to February 2020, the US manufacturing sector added 414,000. It was not until May 2022 that these positions were recovered. Since then, US manufacturing payrolls have been flat, and the industry has even shed more than 44,000 jobs this year," LNN observed in September.
Beyond economics, the vice president has made a laundry list of questionable statements during her campaign. She has said no US troops were stationed in combat zones. She has repeated the “fine people” and “bloodbath” hoaxes. The list goes on, and Kamala Harris can continue to get away with these remarks because network fact-checkers and debate moderators fail to do their jobs adequately.
Perhaps the free pass Harris gets from the media to make statements that can be described as anything from deceptive to wildly inaccurate can be explained by something Jorge Ramos said in 2016. Discussing the upcoming presidential election of that year and how the media was covering it, the Univision anchor proclaimed, “Like it or not, this election is a plebiscite on the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figure in American politics in decades – and neutrality is not an option,”
Ramos is not the only media figure to have expressed the idea that Trump is not worthy of balanced, fair, and objective coverage. To that end, Harris gets away with far more than she would if journalists maintained political neutrality. Unfortunately for the VP, however, the establishment media is no longer the sole fact-checker. In the free spaces of the internet, the truth will out.
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