Vice President Kamala Harris refused Wednesday to explain how she plans to pay for a costly economic plan if Republicans in Congress block her presidential agenda, one of several questions she dodged in her first private interview with a major news network since becoming the Democratic nominee.
“If you can't raise corporate taxes, or if Republicans control the Senate, where are you going to get the money to do that? Are you still going to go ahead with this and borrow money?” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris about her handout-heavy policies.
“Yes, but we have to raise corporate taxes,” the Democratic candidate responded, without explaining how he plans to do that without support from Congress.
“We have to make sure that big corporations and billionaires pay their fair share,” Harris continued. “That's what it's about: paying your fair share.”
When VP Ruhle asked VP Harris what she would do to stop companies affected by higher corporate taxes from leaving the US, VP Harris asserted that CEOs are backing a plan to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
“Well, I work with a lot of CEOs,” Harris said, “I've spent a lot of time with CEOs, and I can tell you, business leaders who are part of what powers the American economy agree that people should pay their fair share.
“They also agree that when they look at my plan — investing in the middle class, investing in new industries, investing and lowering costs, investing in entrepreneurs like small businesses — it makes our economy stronger overall and everyone benefits,” she added.
Harris' proposed economic package, which includes $25,000 checks for first-time homebuyers and tax cuts of up to $6,000 for families with a child in their first year of life, would cost an estimated $1.7 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for Budget Responsibility.
Harris then ignored Ruhle's leading question about how to deal with price gouging without implementing price controls.
“Frankly, I will never apologize for going after companies and corporations that prey on the desperation of the American people,” the vice president replied, saying the proposal to ban federal price gouging on food and household items was “part of a more comprehensive plan for what we can do to lower the cost of living.”
Harris also dodged questions about eliminating the state and local tax deduction for federal taxpayers and the refusal of the International Federation of Trucking Associations to endorse her.
Asked what she would do to support communities that are “at the limit” of accepting immigrants, she discussed the country's “broken immigration system” and the need to fix the border bill that was rejected in the Senate.
“We need a comprehensive plan that includes not just strengthening our borders but what we do to address the fact that we need to create a pathway to citizenship,” she said, but did not answer how to deal with cities overwhelmed by the influx of migrants.
The vice president also dished out some wordplay during the MSNBC interview.
“Frankly, and I mean this wholeheartedly, he hasn't really thought very hard about some of these issues,” Harris said when asked about former President Donald Trump's plan to impose blanket tariffs on foreign goods. “He needs to get serious and come up with a plan. And he needs a real plan, not some talking point at a political rally that ends with an exclamation point, that actually has to think about what the return on investment is, what the economic impact is for regular people.”
At one point during the interview, Harris resorted to the word “comprehensively” to describe her answer about lowering housing costs.
“Part of the work will be through our work in terms of providing benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transportation costs, looking holistically at the relationship between transportation costs and housing costs, and looking holistically at incentives from the federal government to local and state governments to really engage in planning and holistic approaches,” she said.
She also repeated the same response when Ruhle asked for a response to Americans who don't support her policy proposals.
“If you have the dreams and ambitions and aspirations that I believe in, then you're in my plan,” she said. “I have to say, I'm really loved and really encouraged by what I know to be the spirit and character of the American people. We have ambitions, we have aspirations, we have dreams.”
Harris did not offer any new policy proposals at any point in the interview.
