Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’s plan for small businesses that she was pressed on during her recent interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes.
Harris was asked about the various tax benefits she would give to people should she become president, including her proposed tax deduction of up to $50,000 for those starting a small business. The vice president contended she wanted to make sure the richest people in the United States “pay their fair share in taxes,” prompting McCarthy to argue that Harris wants to “harm” people when they start a small business.
“When I opened my first small business, it was a deli, and there’s three lessons I learned” McCarthy explained on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom. “I was the first one to work, I was the last one to leave, and I was the last one to be paid. And if she adds more regulations, I couldn’t open that small business today. I couldn’t hire people to be able to earn a paycheck. That’s the challenge that she doesn’t understand. She’s never owned a business or been an entrepreneur to know the punishment that she creates through her regulations that harm people to have the capital to raise it.”
The former House speaker also referenced Harris’s claim that she has talked “quietly” with members of Congress to make her small business tax reduction a reality, stating he does not know who she is speaking to. He then stated that “she’s not very popular in Congress” and that this is one of the challenges she faces both as a presidential candidate and in a potential role as president.
McCarthy then tied Harris’s lackluster relationship with Congress to the relationship with the public, arguing Democratic voters never chose her as their candidate. He claimed she has never stopped to listen to voters about their challenges throughout her campaign, and that Democrats “should be” concerned about her electability.
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The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, in assessing Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, suggested that a large portion of her platform revolves around “giving people stuff” and that her proposed tax deduction for small businesses falls into this category. He also contended this “disastrous” interview marked the first “adversarial” one she has done on the 2024 campaign trail.
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, was also critical of Harris’s interview, claiming “she proves how unfit she is” to be president whenever she does an interview. However, she stated she hopes Harris continues to do more interviews in the weeks to come, reiterating how it shows she should not be elected president.