Accounting
Harris goes quiet on Biden’s push to tax unrealized gains
Vice President Kamala Harris has gone silent on Democrats’ bid to tax unrealized investment gains — casting doubt on how strongly she’d push for a key plank of the party’s efforts to raise taxes on billionaires.
Harris, who has already pledged to scale back one of President Joe Biden’s key policies on capital gains taxation, is declining to give specifics about her support for other pillars of the administration’s vision to raise taxes on businesses and the wealthy. That includes a White House plan to tax unrealized gains, a major proposed Internal Revenue Code change designed to increase levies on the richest Americans who are often able to avoid taxes under the current rules.
The Democratic nominee still supports a billionaire minimum tax, a campaign official said in a brief statement, speaking on condition of anonymity. Her team declined to provide specifics about that proposal or comment directly on how unrealized gains would be treated.
Hannah Beier/Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloom
Harris’ campaign also declined to say if she supports the specific parameters of the minimum tax on billionaires included in Biden’s annual budget request to Congress, which — despite the name — would apply a 25% minimum levy to income of those with at least $100 million in assets. Her campaign has been mum about whether she would seek to change a provision in the tax code that allows many wealthy individuals to avoid capital gains taxes entirely when they pass assets onto their heirs.
The move to tax unrealized gains was one of the more polarizing features of Biden’s budget proposal — critics saw it as murky to enforce and a disincentive for growth, while advocates cheered it as an innovative way to tax the rich more.
Harris’ silence comes as she’s bolstered her pro-business rhetoric and tacked her policy agenda to the middle to woo Republican and independent voters with polls showing her deadlocked against Republican rival Donald Trump. She described herself as a “pragmatic capitalist” in an interview with Telemundo Tuesday, saying she is part of a new generation of leadership that “actively works with the private sector to build up the new industries of America.”
Days after Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in late July, her campaign said she supports the revenue measures in the president’s budget request, though she’s since broken with him on the scope of a capital gains tax increase, calling for a top rate hike from 20% to 28%, instead of the 39.6% that Biden has embraced.
Capital gains taxes are generally paid when an asset is sold, which means that people who hold an asset that has appreciated considerably don’t immediately pay taxes on the increase. In some cases, the wealthy simply borrow money against the gains rather than having to sell.
Some of the richest people owe relatively few taxes in comparison to their overall wealth because they hold onto their assets indefinitely, vastly growing their personal fortunes through unrealized gains, but rarely recording any income on paper, which would trigger an IRS bill.
The ambiguity on unrealized gains could be strategic — by avoiding taking a position, Harris is able to give herself room to negotiate in the future on a portion of her tax agenda that is closely scrutinized by Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, a Harris ally, predicted over the weekend that a tax on unrealized gains would not be enacted. “That’s an economy killer. Kamala knows that,” Cuban said at an event Saturday in Arizona, according to NBC. “You haven’t heard her talk about it.”
The debate is, in some ways, theoretical, with polls showing Republicans on track to take control of the Senate even if Harris wins the presidency. A divided government dims her hopes of passing the fresh taxes she’s seeking, and may pressure her to avoid digging in on proposals with slim chances of success.
Harris is grappling with how strongly to break from Biden in the race against Trump, where his campaign has said a tax on unrealized gains would “kill 75,000 jobs, reduce investment incentives, hurt long-term economic growth, and target family farms and family-owned small businesses the most.” Trump, for his part, has campaigned on a long list of politically-targeted tax breaks, which economists have warned would add trillions to the national debt.
The Biden budget, which has proposed including unrealized gains when calculating income for the 25% billionaire minimum tax, has also raised concerns from tax professionals.
The plan “would be a departure from the way we’re treating capital gains under current law and how we treat it historically,” Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the right-leaning Tax Foundation, said in an interview. “We’re generally more skeptical of this kind of approach.”
Harris has also campaigned on a slew of other tax measures, including higher corporate tax rates, an expanded child tax credit and expanded deductions for startup businesses.
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This week’s stats focus in part on the job titles seeing the greatest losses at the IRS during layoffs; as well as the states that have proposed or passed alternatives to the 150-hour rule; the percentage of master’s in accounting program applicants since 2020; the number of PwC employees laid off in May; the projected size of Deloitte’s new New York City headquarters; and the amount of 2026 HSA annual contribution limits, depending on coverage.
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. said U.S. officials have asked for information related to the accounting of deals it’s made with some customers and said the cybersecurity firm is cooperating with the inquiry.
The Austin, Texas-based company said in a filing Wednesday that it has gotten “requests for information” from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission “relating to the company’s recognition of revenue and reporting of ARR for transactions with certain customers.” ARR refers to annual recurring revenue, a measure of earnings from subscriptions.
The company said the federal officials have also sought information related to a CrowdStrike update last year that crashed Windows operating systems around the world.
“The company is cooperating and providing information in response to these requests,” the filing states.
U.S. prosecutors and regulators have been investigating a $32 million deal between CrowdStrike and a technology distributor, Carahsoft Technology Corp., to provide cybersecurity tools to the Internal Revenue Service, Bloomberg News first reported in February. The IRS never purchased or received the products, Bloomberg News
The investigators are probing what senior CrowdStrike executives may have known about the $32 million deal and are examining other transactions made by the cybersecurity firm, Bloomberg News
Asked for comment about the filing, CrowdStrike spokesperson Brian Merrill said, “As we have told Bloomberg repeatedly, this is old news and we stand by the accounting of the transaction.”
A lawyer for Carahsoft previously declined to comment on the federal investigations, and representatives didn’t respond to subsequent requests for comment about them.
Tech titan Elon Musk ratcheted up his offensive against Donald Trump’s signature tax bill on Wednesday, urging that Americans contact their lawmakers to “KILL” the legislation.
“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman,” Musk wrote in a
The post came one day after Musk lashed out at the tax bill, describing it as a budget-busting “disgusting abomination” as Republican fiscal hawks stepped up criticism of the massive fiscal package.
Trump hasn’t publicly responded to Musk’s comments, but the White House put out a statement Wednesday saying the legislation “unleashes an era of unprecedented economic growth.”
And House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Musk is “dead wrong” about the bill and that the tax cuts will pay for themselves through economic growth.
Musk’s public condemnation pits him against the president at a critical time as Trump is personally lobbying holdouts on the bill. His campaign against the legislation threatens to stiffen resistance and delay enactment of the tax cuts and debt ceiling increase.
Musk has attacked the legislation days after leaving a temporary assignment leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to cut federal spending. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer’s high-profile role in the Trump administration eroded his business brand and sales of his company’s electric vehicles plunged.
The House-passed version of the tax and spending bill would add $2.4 trillion to U.S. budget deficits over the next decade, according to an
The CBO’s calculation reflects a $3.67 trillion decrease in expected revenues and a $1.25 trillion decline in spending over the decade through 2034, relative to baseline projections. The score doesn’t account for any potential boost to the economy from the bill, which Johnson and Trump argue would offset the revenue losses.
Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of about $377 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has become a crucial financial backer of the Republican party. After making modest donations most years, Musk became the biggest U.S. political donor in 2024, giving more than $290 million.
Johnson said Musk had promised to help reelect Republicans just a day before savaging Trump’s bill. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Most of Musk’s giving was aimed at electing Trump but he also supported congressional candidates. America PAC, the super political action committee that Musk largely funded, spent $18.5 million in 17 separate House races. Though that total pales in comparison to the roughly $255 million he spent backing Trump, the spending means a lot in a congressional election, where challengers on average raise less than $1 million.
Control of the House will likely be decided by the outcome of fewer than two dozen close races in the 2026 midterm elections. The GOP’s chances of holding their majority would suffer a major blow if Musk were to withdraw his financial support.
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