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Donors to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are pushing her to reconsider supporting a proposed tax on the wealthiest Americans, as some Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives try to reshape the Democratic nominee’s governing agenda.

Ms. Harris’s campaign last week said she supported the tax increases included in President Biden’s latest White House budget proposal. One of those plans would require Americans worth at least $100 million to pay taxes on investment gains even if they have not sold the stocks, bonds or other assets that have appreciated.

Under the plan, those Americans would owe a 25 percent tax on a combination of their regular income, like wages, and so-called unrealized gains. The so-called billionaire minimum income tax could create hefty tax bills for wealthy individuals who derive much of their wealth from the stocks and other assets they own.

The proposal has hit a nerve with some of the donors who have flocked to supporting Ms. Harris after Mr. Biden dropped out of the presidential race, according to seven people familiar with the conversations.

Some have directed their complaints to the campaign’s advisers and top allies in the business community who are perceived to be in her inner circle. At least one top donor close to Ms. Harris has raised the issue with her in a private conversation, encouraging her to instead tax the ability of the ultrawealthy to borrow against their wealth.

Allies and staff of Ms. Harris have defended the plan to business leaders in private conversations, explaining that the tax would apply to only a small slice of wealthy Americans and could be delayed for investments that are not easily sold, according to the people familiar with the conversations.

Still, some donors close to Ms. Harris do not believe she is that committed to the idea. “In my interactions with them, the key is she focuses on her values and is not an ideologue about any particular program,” Mark Cuban, a billionaire and the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said in an interview. “From what I’ve been told, everything is on the table, nothing’s been decided yet.”

A campaign adviser said Ms. Harris supported the billionaires minimum tax but was open to alternative ways for substantially raising taxes on ultrawealthy Americans. Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement that Ms. Harris believed in creating a more fair tax system.

“Vice President Harris believes billionaires and large corporations should pay their fair share in taxes, like everyone else,” he said. “They should have to pay a minimum tax rate because it’s not right that they pay a lower income tax rate than a teacher or firefighter.”

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud-storage company Box, who has put $30,000 into her campaign and said he plans to give more, said he and other Silicon Valley leaders he had spoken with saw the proposal as “quite punitive.”

“There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Mr. Levie said. “Most people are waiting to hear from the Harris campaign. Is this a real proposal that is actually being pushed for — or was this something that was inherited from Biden?”

The pushback comes amid growing optimism among lobbyists and donors that Ms. Harris is adopting a friendlier approach to business concerns than Mr. Biden. Some have said privately that they feel that Ms. Harris’s policy positions are less set in stone than Mr. Biden’s were, allowing for outside pressure to be more effective.

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, Ms. Harris said she would create an “opportunity economy” and provide support to entrepreneurs and “founders,” a word in a carefully constructed speech that some attendees saw as targeted toward assuaging wealthy business leaders in Silicon Valley.

“She said founders. I’m good,” Mr. Levie joked on social media during her speech.

Ms. Harris once represented Silicon Valley as a senator from California, and her campaign has been intentional in its opening weeks about delegating staff to tend to the area in a way that Mr. Biden did not. The campaign has encouraged the formation of affinity groups, such as VCs for Kamala, and has hired multiple Bay Area-based fund-raisers, including Stefanie Roumeliotes, a San Francisco political operative, with stronger ties to lure in major tech givers. Ms. Roumeliotes has been at work to set up a group, Tech for Harris, that is meant to recapture some of the Obama-era enthusiasm from billionaires in Silicon Valley.

Ms. Harris has also taken steps to better appeal to the crypto community, which has grown significantly more political and right-wing during the Biden presidency, and her campaign team has met with cryptocurrency executives, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

Those efforts have helped fuel a gigantic fund-raising surge that has netted the Harris campaign at least $540 million in the weeks since she came to the top of the ticket.

The billionaire minimum income tax could be particularly costly for ultrarich tech executives who derive their wealth from owning slices of companies they helped start. Rather than selling their shares of companies, triggering taxes, those Americans can take out tax-free loans backed by the stock they own to finance their lifestyles.

The VCs for Harris group — which includes Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; Ron Conway, a well-known investor; and the billionaire Chris Sacca — surveyed its members about various public policy issues. Roughly 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “taxing unrealized capital gains will stifle innovation,” according to a document viewed by The New York Times. The survey otherwise showed support for Ms. Harris’s agenda.

Investment income has long received preferential tax treatment in the United States, and taxing appreciation on unsold assets would represent a fundamental change in the tax code. Progressive Democrats see the ability of wealthy Americans to pay no tax on their unrealized capital gains as an unfair loophole, and Mr. Biden’s budget includes several other ideas that would change how investments are taxed.

Some progressives have so far said they are unworried about signs that Ms. Harris is adopting more moderate rhetoric about economic issues, maintaining that she has been a key partner in crafting Mr. Biden’s agenda.

The ambitious tax proposal would face an uphill climb on Capitol Hill, where Republicans and some Democrats are skeptical of changing how capital gains are taxed. That dynamic has helped ease some of the concerns on Wall Street about the idea, said Charles Myers, a fund-raiser for Ms. Harris and the chairman and founder of Signum Global Advisors.

“In my world, yes, I do hear about it and there is concern,” he said. “I think almost every person who would raise it as a concern understands that it would never pass Congress even if it’s a Democratic sweep.”

Mr. Myers said he had also heard concerns about some of the other tax proposals included in Mr. Biden’s budget, including raising the corporate rate to 28 percent from 21 percent and quadrupling a tax on stock buybacks to 4 percent from 1 percent. He expects that moderate Democrats in the Senate could sink some of those ideas, too.

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, who studies corporate leadership at the Yale School of Management, said he had raised issues about taxing unrealized capital gains with members of Ms. Harris’s campaign team. He said the campaign did not want to publicly distance itself from the idea. “They don’t want to antagonize the populist support they need to get through the elections and make a big issue of it,” he said.

Those ideas and others will come into play next year, when Washington takes a fresh look at the tax code. Many of the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 are set to expire after next year, and many Democrats want to both raise taxes on high earners and corporations and also extend tax cuts for middle-class Americans. Imposing the 25 percent minimum tax on Americans worth more than $100 million could raise roughly $500 billion in tax revenue over a decade, according to the Treasury Department.

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