Can Harris, Trump really deliver on their economic proposals?

As the 2024 presidential race heats up, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are making campaign promises that may be overly optimistic. Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman joins Market Domination to discuss the candidates' economic proposals and evaluate the likelihood of these plans coming to fruition.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Angel Smith

Transcripción del vídeo

Nearly two months to go until election day.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump kept kicking off their campaigns and kicking them into high gear as they ready for the presidential debate.

But some of their most prominent presidential campaign pitches may be too far out of reach.

Yahoo.

Finance's senior columnist, Rick Newman joins us now with more.

Now, Rick, we always know that what we hear on the campaign trail is not actually what is going to come to fruition and luckily you've gone through and sort of handicapped, um, some of these campaign promises.

Where do you wanna start here?

Yeah, this drives me crazy in the home stretch of every campaign season because the candidates go around saying stuff that there's no way it's likely to happen.

Uh, but, you know, voters listen and they think, wow, it sounds like a really, that'd be really cool.

So, uh I think one place to start the year this year is with tax policy.

I mean, we are definitely gonna see some tax changes and that's, there's a forcing function here, which is all of the 2017 tax cuts for individual rules expire at the end of 25.

So we are going to have a major tax bill.

But some of the things that candidates are proposing, I just think have no chance of getting in there.

For example, Donald Trump says he wants to eliminate uh the income to the federal income tax on social security payments.

Uh Well, that would cost uh about 100 and that would cost about 100 and $70 billion per year in lost revenue to the government.

And it could, it could actually make um social security less stable by just making the budget outlook worse than it already is.

And that's not something that I think really has any support on Capitol Hill, Kamala, Harris and Donald Trump both now say they want to eliminate taxes on tips.

I don't think there's any chance of that happening.

Only about 2% of American workers earn tip income and uh why them, I mean, what about the other 98%?

Why would you just target that again?

That's not something that's really popular on Capitol Hill, in your opinion?

Was that just, was that purely a play for Nevada?

Yes.

Yep.

That's the end of, end of story.

There are 350,000 hospitality workers in Nevada.

Most of them getting tip income.

Um That's the high, they, they have the highest percentage of uh workers earning tip income in the country and it's just just going after their votes and that's some, one of those things, you're just never going to hear about it again.

I also think Kamala harris' uh $25,000 subsidy for first time home buyers.

There's no chance that it's going to happen because any economist will tell you the main beneficiary of that is not going to be the buyer, it's gonna be the seller because that $25,000 is gonna make demand stronger and push up the cost of houses even more, which is already a problem.

So, examples of some of the things that voters are hearing that are never gonna happen.

Um Unrealized capital gains have gotten a lot of attention, particularly among people like us who talk about this stuff.

Um Is that have any chance?

No, I again, I don't think so.

This is, this is better known as a wealth tax uh which Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the biggest supporters of.

Uh it's not.

So this is you have, you have assets that have a value, you haven't sold them and actually gotten the capital gain, the assets, call it.

You know, it could be a stock, it could be a painting, it has a value.

And the idea is that you would try to figure out a way to tax the value of that thing every year.

It's possible.

I mean, legal experts vary on this.

It's possible though that that is unconstitutional that you cannot do a wealth tax.

It would violate the constitution and just the question of whether it's constitutional is a guarantee that there would be legal challenges uh that would drag on for years.

So let's say Congress implemented this, let's say the Treasury and the IRS started collecting that money and then 457 years later, it gets to the Supreme Court and the court says, oh, it's unconstitutional.

I mean, look at the budget nightmare you've got on your hands and you have to give back all this money.

We already have taxes on the books that work.

Um And we know they are constitutional.

So if you want to raise more money from somebody, the wealthy or whoever just use the taxes, we already have.

What about I got out of here with the other Harris policy raising the corporate tax to 28 percent.

Give me the odds on that one short history here.

It was 35%.

Uh Donald Trump raised it down, excuse me, lowered it down to 21% and Joe Biden favored raising it back up to 28% to raise more revenue.

Kamala Harris wants to do the same thing.

Joe Biden could not get that done when Democrats controlled both the House in the Senate during his first two terms.

He tried, it was in the uh build back better program that we've all forgotten about.

So Biden couldn't get, couldn't get it done.

Biden is a master legislator and I, to me if, if Joe Biden couldn't get it when his party controlled Congress.

I, I do not see how in the world Kamala Harris could get it.

Re always love having you on the show.

Thanks for joining us.

Hi guys.