As the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump head toward the November election, both candidates are betting heavily on new tax proposals designed to appeal to their voter base and win over undecided voters.

While both candidates hold populist views on taxation, their starkly different tax plans reflect their very different views on how to promote economic growth and prosperity at a time when many Americans are worried about their ability to meet basic needs, such as buying food or housing.

Harris proposes measures such as higher corporate taxes and the creation of new tax credits, while Trump promises to impose new tariffs and cut taxes on certain businesses. Aside from the proposal to eliminate the federal tax on tips, the two have little in common.

As president, both candidates would have difficulty unilaterally enacting the changes they promised, because taxation is controlled by Congress, not the executive branch. Neither party appears on track to make the kind of large majority gains in the House or Senate that a president would need to whip his program through Congress, and it’s possible that control could remain split between the parties, leading to gridlock.

As such, these plans are more about conveying an economic philosophy to voters than anything else. Trump is polling ahead of his two Democratic challengers on economic issues, and that dominance is difficult for Democrats to shake; a New York Times-Siena College poll conducted last week puts Trump 13 percentage points ahead of Harris on economic issues.

As the current vice president, Harris is trying to both support the policies of the Biden administration, but also differentiate where it makes political sense. Essentially, she is trying to chart a path that appeals to both progressive Democrats who want higher taxes, wealthy Democratic donors who worry about higher taxes, and everyone in between.

So far, Harris has stated that she wants to accomplish the following:

Democrats have been calling for some of the above changes for years. Biden, for example, proposed raising the capital gains tax — basically a tax on profits from the sale of capital gains like stocks or gold — to 39.6 percent. The current rate is 20 percent, meaning Harris’ proposal would represent an eight-percentage-point increase. Harris’ proposal comes with some caveats: It would exempt income from stock dividend distributions from tax and would only apply to taxpayers with income of $1 million or more per year.

Harris’ proposed corporate tax rate – the amount companies must pay on their income – would represent a 7 percentage point increase over the current federal rate of 21 percent. That’s in line with Biden’s 2025 budget blueprint, as is her proposal for a so-called “billionaire tax,” which would impose an annual 25 percent tax on unrealized gains, or the increase in value of unsold assets such as stocks, for people with wealth of $100 million or more. New small businesses can currently claim a $5,000 tax deduction, and Harris proposes giving them up to 10 times that amount.

The idea behind it, Harris said, is to ensure that “big corporations pay their fair share.” But major Democratic donors also praised her plan: Billionaire investor Mark Cuban praised Harris for “going 100 percent center” after she announced the level of the capital gains tax. Her proposals, which focus on the middle class and lowest-income Americans, reflect a similar, more moderate populism.

Her subsidies for first-time buyers are designed to help more people buy their own homes. She has also promised to revive an expansion of the child tax credit that was popular during the pandemic. Harris’ plan would provide a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns, a tax credit of up to $3,600 for parents with children ages 2 to 5, and a tax credit of up to $3,000 for families with children ages 6 to 17. Like Trump, Harris has promised to eliminate taxes on tips, but to a more limited extent than her rival: The vice president’s plan would eliminate federal income tax on tips, but Medicare and Social Security taxes would still be deducted from tipped wages.

Finally, Harris would leave income tax rates unchanged, except for Americans earning more than $400,000 a year. For Americans currently in the highest tax bracket, the income tax rate would go back to the 39.6 percent it was before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts (it’s 37 percent today), and they would also have to pay more Medicare taxes.

Higher capital gains and corporate taxes are supposed to help offset the revenue lost from Harris’s proposed tax cuts. The proposed increase in the child tax credit would cost $1.2 trillion over ten years, and her plan for a housing tax credit would cost an estimated $100 billion. Overall, Harris’ proposal would increase the budget deficit by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget.

Trump’s tax message was less about finding balance than about maximalism: lower taxes on corporations, using taxes to promote his “America First” ideology, and making more far-reaching populist promises than the Democrats.

So far, Trump has said he has the following plans:

During his first term in office, Trump introduced a significant change in US tax law, which, among other things, reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. Now, this rate is to be even lower for companies that want to produce in the US – just 15 percent.

Trump also plans to revisit and expand on another idea from his first term: tariffs. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on Chinese imports were a failure and sparked a trade war with China. This time, he says, he would like to see tariffs of up to 60 percent on goods from China, as well as tariffs of up to 20 percent on all other imported goods. (Trump has also reportedly considered eliminating income taxes entirely and raising tariffs enough to offset the losses such a policy would cause.)

Trump has made protecting U.S. industry a central focus of his campaign, but some economists believe his tariff policies could ultimately hurt American consumers.

“We should just call them import taxes, because that’s what they are,” Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, told Vox. “We import $4 trillion worth of goods every year. That’s a $400 billion tax increase. That’s really quite a blow that’s going to hit middle-income and middle-class people the most,” since the super-rich are more likely to spend their money abroad and on things other than consumer goods.

At the individual level, Trump promised to extend his 2017 individual tax cuts. Harris wants to extend those for everyone except top earners; Trump would extend them for all Americans, regardless of income. (Because those cuts all expire at the end of 2025, Congress will have to decide what to do with those tax cuts regardless of who wins.)

Trump has also proposed eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for retirees – which could save a person about $560 a year. But that could cost as much as $1.8 trillion and further endanger the Social Security fund, which will be depleted in 2035.

Unlike Harris, Trump has not elaborated on how his tax exemption policy on tips would work, but assuming tips would be exempt from all taxes, his plan could cost as much as $250 billion by 2035.

Vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested increasing the child tax credit by $5,000 per child in a CBS interview, but Trump has not yet endorsed that position.

Like Harris, it is not immediately clear how Trump plans to finance these changes, which could cost as much as $7 trillion over 10 years. He has mooted the creation of a commission to reduce waste, possibly led by his billionaire ally Elon Musk. He has also proposed the creation of a sovereign wealth fund – essentially a national-level investment fund – similar to those in Saudi Arabia and China. This fund, Trump says, would finance “major national undertakings” that would reduce national debt and finance infrastructure projects – something that would normally be financed with tax revenues and congressional appropriations.