Harris’ Tax Vision: Policy & Politics

[00:00:00] Joe Selvaggi: This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi. Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race in July left voters with less than four months to learn the policy views of his replacement nominee, Vice President Harris. Indeed, the recently concluded Democratic National Convention offered a parade of party celebrities echoing a tone of a joyful new way forward.

[00:00:32] But vanishingly little in the way of insight into what a future Harris administration would look like. But outside the media’s focus on the candidate’s vibes, the Harris campaign has offered press releases outlining the contours of the tax and spending plans which, she promises, will be the priority of her first 100 days.

[00:00:50] Far from mere rhetorical talking points, Vice President Harris does not equivocate about plans to make permanent many of the emergency rescue plans from the pandemic set limits on price increases for rent and consumer goods, subsidize new home purchases, and increase taxes on assets and income for the wealthiest Americans.

[00:01:10] Such promises offer voters who are more concerned with policy substance than campaign style an opportunity to make informed choices about which candidate most closely shares their vision of a prosperous and free future. Who and what are the intended beneficiaries and benefits? A Ms. Harris blueprint for the economy, who will pay for the new programs proposed, and how will these policy changes likely serve our shared prosperity in the future?

[00:01:34] My guest today is Vice President of Federal Tax Policy and Stephen J. Entin Fellow in Economics at the Tax Foundation, Dr. William McBride, who has extensive experience researching and modeling issues related to tax reform at the state, federal, and international levels. Dr. McBride and his team of researchers have analyzed Vice President Harris tax agenda described in her press releases and during her campaign.

[00:01:55] He will share with us the specific features of the Harris tax plans and will discuss the effects such changes are likely to have on individuals over the next four years and on our economy over the future. When I return, I will be joined by Tax Foundation Vice President, Dr. William McBride.

[00:02:18] Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi and I’m now pleased to be joined by Vice President of Federal Tax Policy and Stephen J. Enten Fellow in Economics at the Tax Foundation, Dr. William McBride. Welcome to Hubwonk, Will.

[00:02:32] William McBride: Thank you for having me.

[00:02:33] Joe Selvaggi: Well, it’s a pleasure to have you. Before we talk about policy, I haven’t had too many folks from Tax Foundation here. Give our listeners a chance. Tell us what you do at Tax Foundation.

[00:02:43] William McBride: Well, as the name indicates, we do tax policy day in and day out, and it’s always a busy time for us, actually. And you can imagine, in the middle of this campaign, here we are studying the candidates tax plans at the presidential candidates these days.

[00:03:00] And whatever’s going on in Congress, which is, changes throughout the year. I had the federal tax team. We have three policy teams. We have a state and local team that covers the 50 states and the, I don’t know, I think there’s like 9, 600 sales tax jurisdictions. So, it gets pretty crazy on that team. Uh, then we have a global team that really, we’ve ramped up in recent years that’s trying to cover, uh, the rest of the world, uh, but primarily Europe, and that is the EU and the member states of the EU and the other countries in Europe. So, they’re busy as well.

[00:03:33] Joe Selvaggi: Wonderful. Well, tax is something that affects us all, like it or not, and we’re recording shortly after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention. A lot is made about the vibes and the excitement and the joy that such events bring to us all. But Hubwonk listeners, our listeners, like to go a little bit deeper and learn more about the policy.

[00:03:54] Particularly interesting is tax policy. What, before we talk about specifics, where do you look for, you mentioned the scope of your information, do you look to third party sites, or how do you find out what tax policy is being proposed, in the case of, we’re going to talk about Vice President Harris tax policy, where do you look for that information?

[00:04:13] William McBride: We look at everywhere we could find, but we have not talked to the campaigns directly, and, but there was a, a statement released by the Harris campaign. The week, uh, the Friday before the convention, and that was really the first detailed picture of policies of any sort. There were a few statements out in the various campaign rallies that we also point to that in cases where we don’t have anything else.

[00:04:38] If they’re on, if they’re making a public statement about the policy, we record that. We keep it all in a tracker. We have a presidential, uh, campaign. tracker that’s tracking the candidates and their policy, tax policy statements. So, you can find that on our website. That’s very handy. A lot of folks use that. I’ve heard from a lot of journalists; they use that as a way to pull together all these various statements that are being made by the candidates.

[00:05:03] Joe Selvaggi: Sure, I think there’s been a lot of grumbling that Ms. Harris hasn’t offered too many interviews to the press, but she has put out these statements. I’m going to quote from at least the ambition of her tax policy.

[00:05:13] I think it’s useful to frame our discussion. Quote, the steps announced today will cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the cost of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the cost of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans.

[00:05:30] Quite ambitious. In fact, I think she wants to do all these things, or at least start doing these things in her first 100 days. Some of it is brand new, but of course she’s the vice president of the current administration. She’s been vice president for three and a half odd years. So, she has some link to what’s going on right now.

[00:05:46] So, let’s start first with some of the things that look like, are very similar to the policies enacted in the height of COVID. The American Rescue Plan Act, which in that case raised child tax credits for children across the board. What part of, let’s say, the, what had been erstwhile temporary rescue measures, what does she want to bring back from those days of COVID?

[00:06:08] William McBride: Well, a lot of it actually. So, as you point out, those were policies from the American Rescue Plan intended to be temporary measures at the time. The apparent intention was to make those temporary and temporarily very generous relief policies addressing the pandemic issues, shutdown of the economy, et cetera. And a lot of it ran through the tax code. Even those economic stimulus payments, they were sometimes called the three series of checks that Millions of Americans got from the federal government. Those ran through the tax code. So, the IRS was challenged, to say the least, during that time. So, the proposal is to bring back a lot of that stuff.

[00:06:49] Again, not the economic stimulus payments, but the, a lot of the credits, the tax credits, in particular the child credit, tax credit expansion. That’s sort of the centerpiece, I would say, of the tax proposals that the Harris campaign has released. So, the original American Rescue Plan version expanded the Child Tax Credit for one year, for 2021, did a number of things to it, but essentially changed the Child Tax Credit from a pro work program, that is, it phased in with income, very much, that was the intentional design of the child credit from the beginning more than 20 years ago, that it was designed to encourage work, encourage people to enter the workforce at low income levels.

[00:07:40] That was removed in 2021, so it was, there was no longer any incentive to work through, to receive a child tax credit. And furthermore, it was made much more generous. And more complicated, they were introduced a couple of steps, different levels of credit for different age children, and so for younger children, the credit was boosted to 3, 600 per child, and for other children up to age 17, I believe, the credit grew to 3, 000.

[00:08:15] And that, so that was the additional feature there was, that was quite novel, was that the credit was issued on a monthly basis. So, this was run through the tax code. Prior to that, the child’s credit, you file your taxes in the spring, and then you may or may not get a child tax credit, depending on your situation.

[00:08:34] So they moved that to be ahead in time. So, it was issued during 2021. At least partially, on a monthly basis, okay, to get the money out faster. Okay. And there are a lot of studies about its effects and whatnot. Basically, they found very large job losses associated with it, even though it was just a 1-year program.

[00:08:57] That is, studies that looked at what would happen if it were made Permanent and people got used to this sort of thing. We found a very large job loss and we as well in our own approach of modeling the effects, we do find job losses and negative effects on the economy. If this policy were made permanent as the Harris campaign would like to do.

[00:09:17] Joe Selvaggi: So, well, I want to go just put an underline that you say essentially in the past, we all know raising kids is expensive. So, we’ll stipulate that. But in the past, a tax credit is allowing you as a worker to keep more of what you earn. You go out there and maybe it’s a not a high paying job, but at least you get paid.

[00:09:33] If you have kids, more, you’ll pay less in taxes. This has been shifted to a program whereby if you don’t work, you get the same amount of money. So effectively, it’s, that’s a misnomer, right? A tax credit is not, it’s not a tax credit. It’s

[00:09:44] William McBride: absolutely a misnomer, and in fact, the federal government officially counted the vast majority of the costs of this program as technically outlays.

[00:09:56] Okay, so these are expenditures. They really are, technically and practically, they are spending through the tax code. And what happened in 2021 was essentially a doubling of that spending. It went from about 100 billion a year for the child tax credit. That is, it was already quite a generous program and costly program.

[00:10:16] It was doubled to about 200 billion dollars a year. So, the, again, the Harris plan is to make that permanent. So, an extra 100 billion or more a year for the child tax credit. But actually, her plan is, takes that, that 2021 experiment and ups the ante somewhat. And it makes it a little more complicated. It adds another condition for newborns. So, for newborn children, the credit is raised to 6, 000. And so, it’s kind of, you know, like a piling on, I would describe it.

[00:10:51] Joe Selvaggi: So, it’s an expensive program. As you say, it doubles the cost of something had been both emergency and temporary. Now it’s It’s not emergency and it’s not temporary, but it also has the more pernicious effect of discouraging work.

[00:11:02] And so far, as you get paid to stay home, you stay home. Those people who are losing their connection to the workforce are, are doubly harmed. They’re given a check and isolated from, from, uh, the, the work community. I want to shift our, uh, conversation to, um, housing incentives. Again, I listed all the ambitious, uh, promises of the plan we talk about the cost of housing on this podcast quite often. We agree that, uh, housing costs are high. Our focus has been on supply, um, that is, trying to encourage more supply, which will, in theory, drive down costs. Um, the Harris program seems to, uh, focus more on the demand side, that is, to subsidize people who don’t have perhaps enough money to buy a house with, uh, I think in her, in this case, a 25, 000 payment assistance for first time homebuyers.

[00:11:51] We all want to help those kids starting their families and getting out there at first time. What does the Tax Foundation see this, A, the expense and the likely effect of giving first time homebuyers 25, 000 with which to buy a new home?

[00:12:05] William McBride: Right, well, it’s like you say, this is a supply problem. This is actually acknowledged across the political spectrum. Your nearby senator up there, I suppose she is your senator, right? Yes, we don’t bring her up very often, but she is a senator. From my direction, she’s far away. She’s far north from D. C. But I suppose she, she is, she is based in DC most of the time, but nonetheless, she’s far in a lot of ways. She’s far in her policy proposals, of course, but her proposal on housing is, makes a lot of sense these days, which is that we really need to build more housing fundamentally.

[00:12:41] This is, so, so this has become, this is acknowledged by Democrats in a lot of places. For instance, the governor of Michigan, Richard Whitmer, also. Says very clearly the solution to our housing problems is more supply. We’ve been in a, in a, in a housing supply deficit. Essentially, since the housing bubble burst more than a decade ago.

[00:13:05] And it’s just taken that long for the housing. Uh, industry to recover from such a calamity there. And we’ve been, so this explains the rising housing prices and everything, but then we’ve had this broader problem of inflation lately that’s affected housing prices, but all sorts of prices. And so the problem then with piling on another demand subsidy is you’re, not only are you not addressing the problem of supply constraints, you’re making it worse by essentially, it’s like push, it’s like pushing on a string, right?

[00:13:40] You are giving people more money to buy houses. But if you have no, no more, no additional houses, that has to then just result in higher prices. You get more people bidding for houses, the same number of houses, you’re going to have a further increase in housing prices. So, this is precisely the problem of the whole, During the pandemic era of subsidies and stimulus and relief payments, through things like child credit, the stimulus payments and all that, 5 trillion plus of stimulus that went out the door really juiced demand for all sorts of things.

[00:14:18] Housing, people were building, of course, decks and things all over the place. Home improvement projects were, you know, sort of a national pastime during the pandemic. But the result was that housing prices really skyrocketed there during the pandemic, and they’re, we’re still feeling the effects of these high prices and no real insufficient increase in supply of houses.

[00:14:44] So, these policies do not address that dynamic, and they will, in fact, make them worse by raising. Uh, the price of housing.

[00:14:52] Joe Selvaggi: Now, we perhaps strongly agree on the reasons for, uh, housing prices to be so high, but the narrative, it seems, in the Harris slash Biden administration seems to be that, uh, housing prices are driven by both the greed of perhaps sellers and also the greed of corporate landlords.

[00:15:06] And there’s even been some proposals, again, I don’t want to attribute this to Harris, uh, Ms. Harris, if, uh, President Biden is the author of this thought, but a five percent, uh, uh, limit on, um Rent increases for corporate landlords. Uh, I don’t care to make the distinction between corporate landlords and any other landlord, but what do you think the effect is of having, let’s say, constraints either on, let’s say, tax benefits for developers or some kind of constraint on effectively rent control.

[00:15:33] What is the likely effect on, let’s say, ordinary people looking, just scraping by, trying to rent. What is the effect of having rent control or limiting the tax breaks of corporate developers and landlords?

[00:15:44] William McBride: Well, this experiment has been run for decades in this country, uh, at the local level. The, of course, New York City, going back several decades, has had various types of rent control.

[00:15:54] A lot of studies have looked at the effects. The effect is the, the owners of the properties no longer have an incentive to maintain those properties if they’re not going to be compensated through higher rents. You get a general deterioration of the housing stock, uh, so effectively the supply is going down over time.

[00:16:16] It’s deteriorating, uh, dilapidating, and you’re getting, you’re not getting new supply coming on because, again, the suppression of prices. So, again, this is actually making the problem worse. The problem is the lack of supply. The price controls will make that problem worse. This has been, this is absolutely a, this is absolutely what has occurred historically, like I said, all over this country and at the city level.

[00:16:47] But in other countries that have tried this more broadly, it’s a terrible economic policy. You can look at the extreme cases of countries like Venezuela or Cuba. Sounds preposterous, but I think folks should really look at those places, even go and visit those places if you want to see what price controls do to an economy and to the supply of the goods and services that consumers want is really devastating, actually.

[00:17:16] Joe Selvaggi: Well, that’s a good segue. I was going to ask about it, but we’ve more or less answered it. The logic of attacking people for the profit motive in housing also seems to be extended. To now people are rightly upset about inflation, about the increased prices of ordinary things like groceries, eggs, milk, this kind of thing.

[00:17:33] She’s at least intimated or described in her policy outline an interest in going after price gouging, this notion that there’s a certain amount of profit is okay, a little more than okay profit is called gouging, and she would effectively limit the amount of profits, let’s say, greedy grocery store owners are enjoying.

[00:17:52] I think the narrative is, you know, Prices have gone up and grocery chains have never been more profitable, ergo, the price gouging. What would you say, what does Tax Foundation see about, again, capping prices in the realm of consumer goods like groceries?

[00:18:07] William McBride: Again, I think it’s, you can Google pictures of Soviet Union grocery stores to get a picture.

[00:18:14] I’ve actually traveled to some of the Eastern Bloc countries years ago and observed, coming out of that situation, they had a really, not a great selection available in their grocery stores of goods, nothing like what we have today in the U.S. This is, again, that these experiments have been run in, in these countries that have tried price controls, and it’s been really ruinous to the people.

[00:18:41] And really, Destroyed the incentive to, for producers to provide their goods, to maintain their goods, in the case of housing, and to, to develop more and better goods, right? So, there’s, it really slows down progress, slows down innovation, it stagnates the, these economies generally. Again, look at Cuba. You’ve heard the stories, people are, in Cuba are driving cars from the 1950s.

[00:19:11] Not out of nostalgia, but that’s what they have available. Um, it’s really a way to turn your economy backwards and in a pretty dramatic way. Venezuela exhibits the case where they went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to now one of the poorest in just a, in the course of a few years of these type policies.

[00:19:31] So that may sound extreme, but that is the path this approach goes down.

[00:19:36] Joe Selvaggi: That’s right. If you take the logic of price controls to its conclusion, you get, we already know what the future looks like. I want to, okay, well, let’s talk about, then let’s shift our conversation really to a lot of these programs we’ve described the tax credits and all these, and the assistance for first time homebuyers, a whole litany of, of proposals that involve spending.

[00:19:54] Let’s talk about revenue. We already know that we’re borrowing, I think, a trillion dollars every 100 days. So, we are already spending quite a bit. This would be additional spending. So, to support some of that, we’ve changed. The ambition is to change the tax code such that we would raise taxes on the wealthy, but leave everybody below 400, 000 alone.

[00:20:12] I think that sounds familiar. That was Obama’s promise, I believe, in 2008, but let’s just, I’ll just throw it out there. We know that about 1 percent of the population, maybe 2 percent make more than 400,000. They’re in trouble. People below 400,000, maybe not. What are her proposals for raising revenue to support some of these ambitious spending plans?

[00:20:33] William McBride: Well, she has pointed to the Biden administration proposals, which are many in the, in the tax department. So, we’ve been real busy at the tax foundation trying to keep track of all these revenue raisers Biden administration over the last four years. So, we did an analysis and put it on our website. The most recent iteration, the, that’s.

[00:20:54] Very detailed, although it’s very handy that the president is required to produce a budget every year, and which, in which the administration lists all of their proposals on the tax side and the spending side. But on the tax side, it’s really remarkable. Spending side as well, I won’t get into it, but the tax side is full of the general thrust in these, these budgets from President Biden over the last four years, has been clearly to raise tax rates, marginal tax rates on high income individuals and on businesses.

[00:21:30] So who are the high-income individuals? You first need to ask yourself. This is where a lot of the investment is occurring. This is where a lot of the saving is occurring. They are high income individuals. You can look at their, their components of their income. It’s really a lot of capital gains, dividends.

[00:21:47] Business income reported at the individual level. So, you are effectively, by raising those marginal tax rates, you’re really raising marginal tax rates on investment and saving. Business investment and investment at the individual level. This is highly destructive to economic growth as a result. And it’s, these are large tax increases.

[00:22:10] They’re varied. I won’t go into all the details. Some of them are very novel approaches to raising capital gains taxes, essentially doubling the capital gains tax rate from where it is today at the very top. And this would take us back to capital gains tax rates that we haven’t seen since about the 1970s.

[00:22:28] So this is really going back, the Harris campaign, I think their, their motto is let’s not go, but go back. Well, these policies would take us right back to the 1970s, and that was not coincidentally, that was a decade with a lot of economic problems, including inflation. Okay, so this is going in the same direction.

[00:22:47] It is raising marginal tax rates on, like I said, business investment. Saving and work, highly productive work by the, by raising those top marginal rates on income. Then on the other side, it’s through a variety of tax credits, including the Child Tax Credit, but as well as the Earned Income Tax Credit and a number of other tax credits, it’s really an explosion of tax credits provided to individuals and to businesses that spends much of the revenue raised through the higher marginal tax rates.

[00:23:20] So it’s really a transfer, a giant transfer program running through the tax code. And the result is, in total, it’s a 5 trillion gross tax increase, a little more than that, in our estimation, over 10 years, which is quite large. But then much of that, again, is given away in the form of these spending programs through the tax code, various tax credits.

[00:23:44] And so the result is, we find it’s not fiscally responsible. The thing that is not addressed in the Biden budgets in any of these years is what to do with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which is a giant issue occurring next year. At the end of next year, most, essentially all of the individual provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as well as the estate tax provisions, expire, and this would result in large tax increases across the income scale.

[00:24:14] We’ve got a calculator and a website you can check out. Run your own numbers, your own income and situation and see what that, what would happen to your family. But the vast majority of taxpayers will face a tax, a substantial tax increase if these things are not extended. The only mention of it in the Biden budgets is that they intend to extend them for everyone earning over, earning under 400,000, as you mentioned, that’s the threshold, and let them expire for others.

[00:24:47] However, it’s not the cost of that approach is not included in the budget. This is a budget, mind you. It is supposed to have those numbers in it. So you, these are big numbers. By our estimation, that approach would cost about 2. 6 trillion dollars over 10 years or more. That is most of the cost of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is for all those taxpayers that earn less than 400, 000.

[00:25:14] So, it remains to be seen how exactly these things add up under either the Biden administration’s approach or the Harris campaign’s approach. But it looks to be fiscally irresponsible. It looks to be very costly. It looks to add trillions to the dead. Um, and without addressing the underlying challenges with the debt that are very well understood for years and decades, actually, which is the growth in the, the big mandatory spending programs, the old age programs, in particular, Social Security and Medicare.

[00:25:52] So, none of that is addressed thus far in the Harris campaign. Instead, we have more spending programs, in particular spending through the tax code. Thank you. That makes this debt situation worse.

[00:26:05] Joe Selvaggi: Yeah, indeed. So, again, avid listeners of Hubwonk will know that we characterize most of these changes in tax code as being arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and that, as you mentioned, the large programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, largely by no nobody’s fault, it’s a demographic shift.

[00:26:26] Um, 10,000 people retire every day. Uh, it’s a lot of money to, uh, support them for their much longer lives. So, there’s no argument here. I wanna just double back before we wrap up the show. There’s also in, in reading her tax policy, an allusion to a concept that I, I find interesting and, and it seems to come up more and more this notion of a wealth tax. It’s not enough to go after income in many of the advocates of left leaning policy because they recognize very wealthy people make money differently. They make it through the appreciation of their assets. They seem to want to go after existing wealth or even, again, we visit the death tax, the inheritance tax and go there.

[00:27:06] Before we wrap up what they’re targeting, I think it’s as much as we can do. Interesting to focus on the philosophy behind why we tax wealthier people more as much as the result, because it seems it’s more a spirit of resentment rather than an interest in revenue collection that these tax policies are being proposed. What would you say about wealth tax?

[00:27:27] William McBride: Well, that’s absolutely the case. Again, it helps to look around and look what’s happened in history when these type policies have been proposed. Wealth taxes have been around for decades in various countries. They pop up at various times, particularly in Europe. A lot of European countries have experimented with wealth taxes.

[00:27:44] They’ve had bad experiences. And they’ve had such bad experiences that they have generally repealed those taxes over time. There’s only a handful of countries left in Europe with any wealth taxation at all. And this is a revolving set. They learn the lesson and they forget it and some other country tries it and then they find that it chases out all of the entrepreneurs and the, the, these, the folks that they’re targeting are the most mobile taxpayers in these countries.

[00:28:10] Of course, they have the ability to get out and take their assets and their income with them, and so it’s, they do. And so, they find that it’s actually, it raises very little revenue on net at the end of the day, these type of wealth taxes. And it causes a lot of economic damage.

[00:28:30] Joe Selvaggi: Yeah, so again, we’ve run out of time.

[00:28:33] I’m sorry, there’s so much to cover, but I appreciate your valuable time. I just want to put a bow on our conversation. We’ve talked about in the top of the show additional spending programs that, absent anything else, increases the amount the government spends, but then we’ve talked about these ambitious tax collection policies, but much of what, much of that is given back in tax rebates or whatever form, wealth transfer, so you said it is five trillion dollars in tax increases, 2.6 trillion dollars in, of those that are given back, and we already have a structural deficit, I mentioned we, we increase our, our, our debt by a trillion dollars every hundred days, That’s our backdrop. When you draw a line under all of this, if, let’s say, Ms. Harris is fortunate enough to be elected, and we know tax policy comes from Congress, it’s just, the President just signs, or doesn’t sign it, let’s assume her party and everybody in the Congress share her view, or her ambition, what is the rate at which, or likely future, as far as Tax debt accumulation, total debt accumulation going forward. Is this sort of steady state or are we on an even more accelerated path towards, dare I say, insolvency?

[00:29:44] William McBride: I think, I think it’s an accelerated path towards insolvency. The main reason is that what’s a, what’s the best single measure of our debt burden? It’s the debt to GDP ratio. Notice it’s got GDP in there, right?

[00:29:58] So if you’re simultaneously raising taxes and implementing new price controls and other policies that are dragging down that GDP number, okay, you are mechanically increasing the debt burden through that over time. And it is a process that takes years and years to unfold, but that’s the time frame that matters for this.

[00:30:19] You need to think about what the impact on the debt to GDP ratio over the long run is, accounting for the economic impacts. And we have done that. We do our own modeling of that. And we do find that this approach is generally, the Harris campaign’s approach is not promising that card. It does slow down the economy.

[00:30:38] And it, while it raises tax revenue, it raises it in an inefficient manner that will result in less revenue once you account for that smaller economy. So, the effect is that it has either a negative effect on the debt to GDP ratio, that is, makes it worse by a few points, percentage points, or it has close to no effect.

[00:31:04] So it’s not improving that measure is my point. It’s really, that is probably the single most important measure that policymakers should be focused on these days. This is a very dire situation. It’s much More serious than it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and it should be the number 1 issue in my opinion.

[00:31:24] That’s the number 1 metric that these campaigns should be focused on. Instead, I would say both campaigns, the Trump campaign as well, is just Ignoring it, unfortunately.

[00:31:35] Joe Selvaggi: Indeed. We have criticisms for both candidates. This happens to be Ms. Harris’s opportunity. But I like your description. I mean, you have a numerator and a denominator.

[00:31:44] And if the debt is big and the denominator of the GDP is small. Not big. Uh, we’re all in a lot of trouble. We’re sort of milking the cow without, with hoping that the cow doesn’t die because there’s a lot of milk that keeps us all as prosperous as we are. We’ve run out of time, I’m, I’m sorry to say, but I’m sure you’ve piqued the interest of our listeners.

[00:32:04] Where, I’ve enjoyed reading your research and others at Tax Foundation. Where can our listeners find your work and the work of the Tax Foundation?

[00:32:12] William McBride: Sure. It’s at taxfoundation.org. We have a lot of stuff there, so I think you’d have to be fully retired and a speed reader to actually keep up with it all. So, please reach out to me or others on our website, and we’d be happy to help. I’ll guide you and direct you to whatever you need.

[00:32:29] Joe Selvaggi: Well, wonderful. For those people who are following this election and still care a little bit about the substance and of those choices. So that’s great. You’re a great resource. Thank you for joining me today, Will. You’ve been a wonderful guest.

[00:32:39] William McBride: Okay. Thank you. Take care.

[00:32:44] Joe Selvaggi: This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you, and better for us, if you subscribed to Hubwonk on your iTunes Podcatcher. It would make it easier for others to find Hubwonk if you offer a 5 star rating or a favorable review.

[00:33:00] We’re grateful if you want to share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re certainly welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.