One of the first priorities for President Donald Trump when he took office in 2017 was to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a package that slashed tax rates across the board and included reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to a far more globally competitive 21%. Unfortunately, Congress didn’t have the votes to make these changes permanent, so once Joe Biden got into office, the talk began of either repealing the provisions of the Trump tax cuts or simply letting them expire in 2025.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, as Kamala Harris’s campaign has, on the one hand, taken the approach of promising to hand out goodies to first-time homebuyers to the tune of $25,000 of assistance with their down payment and a $6,000 tax credit for each child. As Tom Crist opines at The Federalist, “No one has put a camera in her face and asked ‘How are you going to find $25,000 per home buyer? Where will the money come from?’ … Is this like a high school kid promising chocolate cake for lunch and cancelation of all homework as his platform for student council president?”

Here’s where the money will come from, Tom: $5 trillion in tax hikes over the next 10 years. As they said at the Trump War Room, “Kamala wants to raise taxes on 91% of American families across EVERY income bracket by repealing the Trump Tax Cuts, wants to impose trillions in tax hikes to pay for her Green New Scam, wants a higher business tax rate than socialist Venezuela, wants a carbon tax, and so much more.”

In fairness to Harris, for the most part, she’s simply maintaining the Biden approach to the tax code envisioned in his FY2025 budget. And if you believe the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, raising the corporate income tax rate back to 28% — a 33% increase that’s a key part of the Harris plan — will provide $1 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade, according to this Reuters story. But the same group also calculated that the entirety of Harris’s package would balloon the deficit by $1.7 trillion. Meanwhile, another advocacy group, Americans for Tax Reform, pegged the cost of the Harris tax hikes at that staggering $5 trillion over 10 years, with many of the increases hitting the under-$400,000 crowd on whom Biden promised not to raise taxes.

“The discredited Biden bundle is a package of tax changes that systematically attack the incentives to work, save and invest across the economy,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman. “Kamala Harris is now promising tax policies that will be even worse than the ones she helped Joe Biden enact. Believe her.”

One of those worse policies is straight from the radical left-wing playbook of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. That would be the idea of taxing unrealized capital gains, an unprecedented move that would basically allow the IRS to make up your tax rate based on money you may never see. While this “voodoo economics” is only intended at first for those with assets of $100 million or more, you can bet your bottom dollar that the $100 million will plunge to perhaps $1 million as the deficit increases.

What the Democrats have either failed to understand or, perhaps in a sinister fashion, understand all too well is that every dollar taken by government from an individual is a dollar they cannot spend or invest in job creation. (Politicians love to have that power to tax, which, as former Chief Justice John Marshall noted, is the power to destroy.) And when it comes to corporate taxes, a dollar taken from a business has to come from somewhere to maintain the bottom line, and that “somewhere” is consumers and employees. The benefit to Harris’s constituents is zero.

Our federal government has seldom had a revenue problem, and that was solved by the advent of backup withholding tax, which became permanent after World War II. But what our government really has is a spending problem, and that problem will get worse under a Harris administration that wants, among many other things, to hand out money for down payments on a house or tax credits for having kids (but only if you qualify).

Losing the Trump tax cuts will remove the cushion that kept us with some semblance of an economy during the COVID crisis. But if your goal is control, the Harris/Walz team will be happy to take more for themselves.