Billionaire investor Mark Cuban insisted Thursday that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris would not tax unrealized gains as president.
“Every conversation I’ve had has been that it’s not going to happen,” Cuban said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Cuban’s remarks could signal a new rift in fiscal policy between Harris and President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race in July and endorsed the vice president as his successor.
Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget plan proposes a 25% minimum income tax on Americans with wealth over $100 million.
Unlike current law, Biden’s budget calls for an annual tax on unrealized capital gains (the increase in the value of unsold assets) on the wealthiest Americans. This plan has been rejected by Republicans and even some Democrats.
Harris, who took over the Democratic ticket less than four months before Election Day, has not explicitly abandoned plans to tax unrealized gains.
In a speech Wednesday to further outline her economic policy, however, Harris said she supported a “minimum tax on billionaires.”
Cuban, who says he speaks frequently with Harris’ team, told CNBC she is not interested in taxing unrealized gains.
He warned: “I’m not going to speak on behalf of the vice president, she’s the one who makes the final decision.”
“Yet I talk to these people three or four times a week, I have back-and-forth conversations, and their words to me are: ‘This is not where we want to go.'”
“We need to find alternative revenue sources,” Cuban said, according to Harris advisers, “and those alternative revenue sources are intended to replace what the unearned income — the unrealized gains tax in the Biden plan — would have implemented.”
Harris, Cuban said, “takes the Biden plan as her starting point, but it’s not necessarily her ending point.”
Harris’ campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Cuban’s remarks.
Harris, whose fledgling campaign has sought to appeal to moderate voters, on Wednesday backed away from the Biden budget plan to raise the capital gains tax from 23.8% to 39.6% for households earning more than $1 million.
Harris’ plan would instead raise the long-term capital gains tax rate to 28%. Harris’ campaign stressed in a press release Wednesday that that figure is “well below the rate proposed” in Biden’s budget.
“She believes this approach strikes the right balance,” the campaign said.
Harris is unveiling her policy plans in the days leading up to her first, and perhaps only, debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump, which is scheduled for next Tuesday.
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