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The state of the U.S. economy, about $26 trillion in total, will be one key to determining whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Voters overwhelmingly say it is one of their top concerns, but when the economy is this big, the way politicians talk about it, as a problemcould change dramatically over time. The past three years have been defined by inflation and high interest rates, and those are top concerns for voters. That’s a drastic shift from 2016 and even 2020, when Democrats made income inequality — especially the concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent — a top concern, however polarizing that may have been for wealthy donors.

Amid that shift, Harris released a tax plan Wednesday that signals that easing income inequality, at least to the extent that it is reinforced by the tax code, will not be one of her priorities. The Democratic nominee is backing away from President Joe Biden’s plan to raise capital gains taxes on people earning more than $1 million a year to nearly 40 percent, she said during a campaign visit to New Hampshire. Instead, she plans to moderate that increase to 28 percent. That number is a key policy threshold. It’s the same rate that President Obama proposed (though it applied to people earning $500,000) and the one that Ronald Reagan set in 1986.

As for tax increases, they are essentially a dead end in the middle of the political spectrum. The policy is the centerpiece of a broader, business-friendly policy plan that aims to spur 25 million new small businesses under the Harris administration. “We will tax capital gains at a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses,” she said in New Hampshire. Capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes and are based on investments, which makes them so attractive to wealthy people whose net worth is largely tied up in stocks, bonds and other assets. The current rate is 15 percent for most people, but it can go as high as 20 percent for the very wealthy. For those earning more than $1 million a year, Harris’ plan would change the all-in tax rate to 33 percent, according to New York Times(An additional 5 percent surtax applies to incomes below $1 million.) That’s about 10 percentage points higher than the Trump-era 23.8 percent but 11 points lower than Biden’s proposed plan.

Chances are it won’t affect many people. According to Credit Suisse, there are about 24.5 million people with $1 million or more in assets — like a home. But only about 0.5 percent of U.S. households — about 635,000 of 127 million — actually have an annual income of that level. But that doesn’t mean its effects won’t ripple through the economy. Income inequality actually declined in 2022 for the first time since 2007, according to the U.S. Census — thanks in large part to a decline in incomes for the wealthy and middle class during the pandemic. It would be a mistake to conclude that a modest increase in capital gains, rather than the near-doubling that Biden has proposed, would cause income inequality. worse. But looking back at the Obama-Reagan metrics, this is basically restoring the status quo that exacerbated the problem in the first place.