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Experts baffled by unrealized capital gains tax plan: ‘This is voodoo economics… it’s absolutely ridiculous’

August 24, 2024 | | Print Article

Former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder is no fan of Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ radical tax proposals.

According to various reports, Harris supports imposing a 25 percent tax on so-called “unrealized capital gains” and hiking the corporate tax rate.

Speaking with Fox News about this agenda, Puzder cried foul.

“It would be devastating to the economy,” he said. “You’re going to give up revenue, you’re going to lose companies, we’re going to lose business.”

Plus, he continued, this strategy never works.

“The last president who was a Democrat that did anything rational on taxes, again, was Bill Clinton,” Puzder said. “He cut the capital gains rate. He didn’t increase it, he cut it. And when he cut it, he and Newt Gingrich were able to balance the federal budget.”

“The idea that we’re going to tax unrealized capital gains, that’s just absurd. This is voodoo economics… it’s absolutely ridiculous,” he added.

Exactly. The key to raising revenue is to CUT TAXES, not increase them.

Case in point: “The original Trump tax cuts… not only created jobs, they created increased tax revenue,” Puzder noted.

This is true.

“The Congressional Budget Office’s May 2022 forecast shows that the government now expects to bring in more tax revenue in the decade following the 2017 ‘Trump tax cuts’ than it had projected prior to the December 2017 passage of tax reform,” the Heritage Foundation noted in 2022.

“It doesn’t look like the tax cuts—which government scorekeepers said at the time would cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years—have been anything like the fiscal nightmare that some on the left would lead us to believe,” the foundation added.

Exactly, but Democrats refuse to acknowledge this point. If anything, they’ve chosen to ignore it and instead double down on stupid.

“I thought when we got rid of President Biden as a candidate, when he withdrew or was driven out, I thought we’d end up with Kamala-nomics instead of Bidenomics, and it would be basically the same thing,” Puzder said. “But it’s really much, much worse. These are irrational policies that will drive us into an economic ditch.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich agrees.

“You need to understand, a 25 percent increase in unrealized capital gains means, theoretically at least, if your house goes up in price, in value, the government can step in and say: give me the money,” he told Fox News. “And if you don’t have the money, the government can step in and say: give me the house.”

Correct.

“This would be the most crazy tax structure we have ever seen,” Gingrich continued. “It makes Venezuela look normal. It makes Russia look normal,” Gingrich stressed.

“That speech last week in Raleigh, where [Harris] outlined her economic plan, that was crazy. That was so far to the left of Bernie Sanders that Gorbachev in Russia would have thought it was a radical speech,” he added.

“Shark Tank” star and investor Kevin O’Leary has also slammed Harris’ proposals, calling them “bad policy.”

Speaking with Fox News, he was particularly concerned about the vice president’s call for price controls.

“That’s beyond crazy,”  he said. “Imagine America where there’s a ministry of pricing for groceries that tells a farmer what an apple can be sold for and what you can buy it for. That is a horror film for Netflix that no one’s even written the script for. That’s not America. There’s no chance in hell that’s going to happen.”

Vivek Saxena
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