Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic plan in a speech Aug. 16, which included a press for Big Government by putting a ban on price gouging for groceries and food, the cancelation of medical debt (what’s next, credit card debt?), a child tax credit to provide $6,000 per child to families for the year of the baby’s life, and $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers.
The only problem for those homebuyers is that if you lived in Harris’ San Francisco, where the median home sale price has soared to an outlandish $1,300,000, you wouldn’t even make 2% of the down payment necessary to get into that home. Good luck. While we are giving away freebies how about we add in free school lunch, unlimited recess and no school on Friday?
The challenge with all these populist ideas is how do you pay for them? Well, if Americans don’t vote on popularity but look at the policies, here is what you would learn is already going on in San Francisco which may foreshadow the policies we will see over the next four years.
HARRIS PROPOSES MAJOR CORPORATE TAX HIKE, REVERSING TRUMP ERA CUTS
This tax, approved by voters in 2019, imposes an additional tax on large businesses to fund homelessness services. This rate is between 0.175% and .69% of gross receipts over $50 million, depending on the industry. Businesses or combined groups that pay the administrative office tax also pay an additional tax of 1.5% on their payroll expenses in San Francisco.
This tax is in addition to any commissions paid to real estate agents. San Francisco imposes a Real Estate Transfer tax on the sale of real property. The rate is graduated based on the sale price ranging from 0.5% for properties under $250,000 to 6% for properties over $25 million dollars. This is another clear example of redistribution of wealth and even for middle class folks who live in San Francisco (that median price of $1,300,000), it would cost them $10,500.
If you live in California, you know one thing. You pay plenty of state taxes, particularly state income taxes which balloon to 13.3% at the highest level. But in January of this year, since California fell further and further into a deficit, the rates went up to an eye-popping 14.4%, which is the result of a no limit on California’s 1.1% employee payroll tax for State Disability Insurance.
Follow the policies. Social Security under Kamala could have Americans paying 6.2% on all their income and the answer to solve all problems could be to just increase your taxes.
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The city imposes a one cent per fluid ounce excise tax on the initial distribution within San Francisco of sugar-sweetened beverages, syrups and powders. When you believe in Big Government, you just tax items to attempt to change behavior.
The state of California leads all states in the country with a 7.25% sales tax. But it gets even better for those middle-class folks in San Francisco where the sales tax is a whopping 8.63%.
Does this mean that the United States will see a potential federal consumption tax on all Americans on top of the income taxes and payroll taxes we pay today? It is no wonder that San Francisco has completely lost the middle class, and it now pretends to benefit the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor?
They say that past performance is no guarantee of future results, but it can give people tremendous insight on how the leader will make decisions in the future. The question is whether voters will pull the lever in November on popularity or on policy?
If the polices enacted the last six years in San Francisco are a harbinger for the future, putting Kamala Harris in charge will give us all a steady dose of one thing. Getting taxed to death by a thousand paper cuts.
