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Harris Launches Ad Blitz Hitting Trump Over Project 2025
Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign continue to hammer former President Donald Trump over Project 2025, the 922-page conservative agenda for the next Republican administration developed as a project of the Heritage Foundation.
The Harris camp launched a new ad blitz Wednesday seeking to tie Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, to the controversial right-wing policy plan. In a 60-second spot, the Harris campaign calls Project 2025 a “blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever, overhauling the Department of Justice, giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance, eliminating the Department of Education and defunding K-12 schools, requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies and severe cuts to Medicare and Social Security.”
The ad includes video of Trump talking about revenge, before concluding with a final warning. “Donald Trump may try to deny it, but those are Donald Trump’s plans,” the narrator says. “He’ll take control. We’ll pay the price.”
Trump has repeatedly tried to deny any connection to the sweeping project, claiming that he knows nothing about it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump said in a social media post early last month. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” Trump has also promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, including “no cuts” or changes to the retirement age.
But the former president has struggled to distance himself from Project 2025, in part because many of his advisers were involved in the effort and would be expected to join his administration for a second term — and in part because Democrats have latched onto the plan like a dog with a meaty bone.
The Harris team has made its focus on Project 2025 a core part of a $370 million paid media campaign it has reserved for the last couple of months of the election. The Project 2025 ad blitz is reportedly set to start this week on television and digital platforms across seven battleground states — and in the Palm Beach, Florida, market, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is located.
A new analysis of Project 2025 tax plans: As Democrats look to use Project 2025 against Trump, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, warned Tuesday that the tax plans in that conservative playbook would hit the middle class while benefitting the wealthy.
Project 2025 calls for an “intermediate tax reform” that would create just two tax brackets of 15% and 30% and eliminate most deductions, credits and exclusions. Capital gains and qualified dividends should be taxed at 15%, the plan says, and the corporate tax rate should be lowered to 18%.
The Center for American Progress analysis by Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the think tank, says that the proposed changes would immediately raise taxes by $3,000 for the median family of four, earning about $110,000 a year. A typical individual earning about $40,000 a year would have his or her tax bill climb $950. Meanwhile, some 45,000 households making more than $10 million a year would get tax cuts averaging $1.5 million or more, potentially up to $2.4 million a year. A corporate tax rate of 18% would translate to some $24 billion in tax cuts for the 100 largest U.S. companies.
Project 2025 also calls for an eventual shift to a consumption tax, which it says “would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues.”
The CAP analysis says such a change would result in an average tax increase of $5,900 for the middle 20% of households and an average tax cut of $2 million for the top 0.1%. And inflation would see a one-time spike. “Replacing all income taxes with a value-added tax—a form of consumption tax—would require at least a 45 percent tax on goods and services, sending prices soaring,” CAP said in a press release.
Chart of the Day: Breaking the Tax System
In a new analysis of tax revenues in the wake of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, researchers at the Center for American Progress confirmed what most fiscal experts across the political spectrum have long known: Tax cuts reduce federal revenue, and the Trump tax cuts were no exception.
“The tax legislation that President Donald Trump signed in December 2017 significantly reduced federal revenues, with the largest tax cuts going to the richest Americans,” the analysts wrote. “Following the enactment of these tax cuts, federal revenues fell dramatically—as the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected would occur at the time the law passed—and they remain below projections of federal revenues made prior to their enactment.”
More broadly, this chart from the analysis suggests that the tax cuts passed under Presidents Bush and Trump have permanently reduced tax revenues, regardless of economic conditions. “[I]t didn’t used to be possible to have revenues this low with employment this high,” the researchers said. “And politicians cut taxes dramatically, leaving the country with record-low revenues given the state of the economy.”
Quote of the Day
“If Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, OK?”
– Former President Trump, again raising baseless questions about election integrity, this time in an interview with TV’s “Dr. Phil” McGraw. Trump added: “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter — I do great with Hispanics, great, I mean at a level no Republican has ever done. But if we had an honest vote counter, I would win California.”
There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in California and no Republican presidential candidate has won the state since George H.W. Buch in 1988. Trump lost California to Joe Biden by nearly 30 percentage points in 2020.
Supreme Court Upholds Block on Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan
The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld an injunction blocking a major part of President Joe Biden’s effort to forgive billions of dollars in student loan debt. The high court’s ruling leaves millions of participants in the Saving on a Valuable Education program, known as SAVE, in limbo as they await a final determination of the program’s legality.
Last summer, the high court rejected an earlier plan to forgive upwards of $400 billion in student loan debt, spurring the Biden administration to roll out a more limited plan with a different basis in law. But lawsuits by more than a dozen Republican-led states resulted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit putting a hold on the revised program earlier this summer. The Biden administration made an emergency request to lift the injunction, but today the court declined to do so.
The SAVE program reduces monthly student loan payments based on factors including a borrower’s income and household size, and reduces the time required to earn full loan forgiveness. The Biden administration says the program has allowed more than 4 million borrowers to eliminate their monthly payments entirely.
It’s not clear how much the plan will cost in the long run if it survives various legal challenges, though it is clear the cost would be significant. In an analysis of a similar program, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost roughly $230 billion over 10 years. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated a cost of $276 billion over a decade, while the Penn Wharton Budget Model came up with $475 billion, though with a high degree of uncertainty around that estimate.
The Biden administration said it would continue to “aggressively” defend the program in court. “We won’t stop fighting against Republican elected officials’ efforts to raise costs on millions of their own constituents’ student loan payments,” White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement.
Fiscal News Roundup
- Supreme Court Rebuffs Biden Administration Plea to Restore Multibillion-Dollar Student Debt Plan – Associated Press
- Harris Campaign Launches Project 2025 Ad Blitz to Run Until Election Day – The Hill
- Harris’s Ad-War Message: Trump Is Pro-Billionaire, She Worked at McDonald’s – New York Times
- Harris Gains on Trump on Economy, Crime: Survey – The Hill
- Fox News Poll: Harris Closes Gap With Trump in Sun Belt States – Fox News
- Having a Family Is Expensive. Here’s What Harris and Trump Have Said About Easing Costs – Associated Press
- Wealthier Homeowners Nab Billions in Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency – Politico
- The Typical U.S. Worker Out-Earned Inflation by $1,400 a Year, Data Shows – NBC News
- Abbott Says Texas Border Issue Is Solved – The Hill
- Trump Campaign Was Warned Not to Take Photos at Arlington Before Altercation, Defense Official Says – Associated Press
- ‘She Can Go to Hell’: Vance Blasts Harris Over Afghanistan Withdrawal in Harshest Rhetoric So Far – NBC News
Views and Analysis
- The Trump Tax Cuts Led to Record-Low, Not High, Revenues Outside of a Recession – Bobby Kogan, Brendan Duke and Jessica Vela, Center for American Progress
- Project 2025’s Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes on the Middle Class and Cut Taxes for the Wealthy – Brendan Duke, Center for American Progress
- Vance Repeats a Bogus Trump Claim on ‘Factories’ Debunked Years Ago – Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
- Why the Fed Shouldn’t Stop Worrying About Inflation – Bloomberg Editorial Board
- Build, Baby, Build – Harold Meyerson, American Prospect
- You Want Policies? Trump’s Got Policies – Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
- This Is the Most Important Vibelection of Your Lifetime – Jessica Karl, Bloomberg