Vice President Kamala Harris gave a long pause during her interview on MSNBC when she faced a question over how she would pay for her economic plans.
The moment came early in the interview where Harris batted away slow-pitch questions such as ‘can we trust you?’
Interviewer Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris, who was giving her first network TV interview since securing her party’s nomination, how she would pay for her economic plans.
‘If you can’t raise corporate taxes or if GOP takes control of the Senate, where do you get the money to do that,’ her interviewer asked, after Harris outlined some of her plans like a $6,000 credit for young couples or subsidies for new small business ventures.
Republicans stand a decent chance of taking the chamber from the narrow Democratic majority, with a Montana Democratic-held seat growing increasingly vulnerable.
‘But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,’ Harris told her after a pause.
‘And we’re going to have to raise – we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it,’ Harris said.
‘We’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,’ Vice President Kamala Harris said when quizzed on how she would pay for her economic plans
She neglected to say the details of her plan, which include a new 25 percent minimum tax on people worth more than $100 million, a capital gains hike, and an increase in the corporate tax to 28 percent.
Ruhle herself said after the interview that ‘she doesn’t answer the question … Where is she going to get the money from?’
‘She said we just have to do it. And that’s great and that’s a campaign promise,’ she added.
The moment came in an interview where Harris blasted Trump for wanting to extend the array of his 2017 tax cuts.
‘The facts remain that Donald Trump has a history of taking care of very rich people, and I’m not mad at anybody for being rich, but they should pay their fair share,’ Harris said.
Harris said her plan would cut taxes for 100 million American, protecting those earning less than $400,000 per year.
She talked about building an economy where people have an ‘ability to buy a home, to start a business, to take a nice vacation from time to time.’
She also responded to Trump’s claims she never worked at McDonald’s by revealing reciting one of the fast food chain’s famous jingles.
But the candidate avoided major stumbles, after facing pressure from Republicans and the media to do more interviews.
Ruhle also asked Harris how she could raise taxes on corporations without sending them overseas where taxes were cheaper.
‘I work with a lot of CEOs I have spent a lot of time with CEOs, let me tell you that the business leaders that are actually part of the engine of America’s economy agree that people should pay their fair share,’ she said.
Harris avoided mostly avoided stumbles in a relatively safe space, on a day when she was campaigning in battleground Pennsylvania while Trump was hammering her in battleground North Carolina.
Her first interview since her ascent, on CNN, featured more stumbles.
She finds herself in a tight race with Donald Trump, who delivered a speech on his economic plans this week in Georgia where he vowed to ‘take other countries’ jobs’ and once again slid into attacks on his rivals.
President Biden’s budget calls for hiking taxes for corporations and upper income earners to raise an estimated $5 trillion.