Kamin spent more than a decade thinking, teaching and writing articles about the best way to raise money from rich people for government programs before joining the Biden White House. He explored many of those with Lily Batchelder, a fellow NYU professor who won Senate confirmation on Wednesday to become assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy.
The two ran through a menu of options, in a 2019 paper, for extracting more money from America’s richest people, including a wealth tax, taxing capital gains at death, raising the top rate for high-income Americans and a financial transaction tax.
Within liberal tax-wonk circles, a 51-page treatise by Kamin and Batchelder in 2019 showed how far the Democratic Party had moved since the 1990s and 2000s, when the idea of raising taxes on the rich was regarded as a loser at the ballot box. Biden aides now regularly cite polls showing the majority of Americans support higher taxes on the wealthy.
At the same time, many farm-state and moderate Democrats remain wary, especially with respect to safeguarding family farms and businesses. The House Ways and Means panel set aside the White House capital gains proposal—which would have raised $322.5 billion by ending step-up in basis and boosting the top capital gains rate to 39.6%—but did endorse a 3% surtax on those earning $5 million.
“Anything that deals with the set of issues around inherited wealth is challenging, from a policy perspective and from a political perspective as well,” Deese said.
Friends and allies say Kamin’s fascination with tax and budget policy was inherited from his parents, both career public servants. His father served as the assistant attorney general of Arizona and as a judge for the Arizona Superior Court for 20 years, while his mother was the first director of the Arizona Governor’s Office for Children and later ran the Children’s Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“Public policy and law would define our conversations around the dining room table,” Kamin said in 2012 to NYU Law Magazine.
After graduating from Swarthmore College, Kamin worked for two left-leaning economic and budget think tanks, attended law school on a scholarship for promising public-policy experts and then landed in President Barack Obama’s administration at the National Economic Council and the Office of Management and Budget. Older, more experienced Obama officials were impressed with his meticulous approach to data and numbers.
He loved poring over spreadsheets and reading documents from the Congressional Budget Office, Furman said.
“He is not the person who will push his way into the middle of the conversation or try to dominate, but when he does speak up, it will be very thoughtful and generally learned and knowledgeable,” said Bob Greenstein, one of Kamin’s former bosses and the former president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group.
Now, though, is the time for politics. Biden’s economic agenda is at risk of collapse if the president can’t hold the Democratic Party’s sparring factions together. Coming days and weeks will show how much of Kamin’s vision makes it into law.
—With assistance from Laura Davison.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.