Vice President Kamala Harris’s tax plans would be disastrous for the US economy. She wants to raise individual and corporate taxes, as well as tax unrealized capital gains. Harris and her campaign cloak these proposals in the language of fairness and economic justice. In reality, they will stifle economic progress by killing incentives to save and invest. Punishing production and saving won’t create an “opportunity economy”—unless you work for the Internal Revenue Service.

Harris wants to raise income taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year. That’s a hefty sum. It seems obvious that we’d want those earners bearing a larger share of the tax burden. The problem is, they already do. The top 1 percent of earners pay more than 45 percent of all federal income taxes. Raising rates will cause high earners to expend more resources sheltering their incomes, instead of investing in capital markets and contributing to economic growth.

The vice president also wants to raise corporate taxes from 21 percent to 28 percent. Keep in mind the OECD average is 23 percent. Harris’s plan will immediately make American businesses less competitive in the global marketplace. Furthermore, contrary to Harris’s claims, c-suite fatcats won’t bear most of the costs. Consumers and workers pay for corporate tax hikes in the form of higher prices and lower wages, respectively. Businesses raise prices to cover the costs of larger tax bills, and worker compensation erodes due to reduced corporate capital formation.

But these pale in comparison to the dangers of taxing unrealized capital gains. Harris and the Democrats want a slice of your portfolio’s appreciation, even if you don’t have the liquidity to cover it. This policy almost appears designed to force investors to turn unrealized gains into realized gains. How else are they going to come up with the cash to meet their tax obligations? Economies grow when wealth is put to work financing long-term investments. It’s massively counterproductive to stifle those investments by forcing capitalists to pay for the supposed sin of creating value.

Ignore the fact they want to start with individuals whose net worth exceeds $100 million. As anyone familiar with the history of the US tax system can tell you, new taxes are always introduced on the affluent. But the slippery slope inevitably brings the taxman to ordinary families’ doors. Taxing paper gains would set a dark precedent. It would be only a matter of time before the middle class got roped in, too.

Harris and her allies call themselves progressives. But their policies cause economic stagnation, not progression. If they really cared about economic opportunity, they would restructure the tax system to stop artificially discouraging saving and investment. Economists have long known that it is better to tax consumption instead of investment. All taxes create economic distortions, but taxing income creates more than taxing consumption, since the former inhibits thrift. Economist Scott Sumner recently proposed a value-added tax (with a rebate for low earners, to minimize the burden on the less well-off) combined with an investment-exempted income tax. This is no more administratively burdensome than our current system, but has the important benefit of removing disincentives to accumulate capital.

The only way to increase living standards, and hence promote human flourishing, is to make labor more productive. The more capital available to workers, the higher their wages; the faster that capital accumulates, the faster their wages grow. Yet Harris wants to upend this process with a growth-killing series of tax hikes. That might be good for government planners, but it’s awful for ordinary Americans.