WASHINGTON —
President Joe Biden delivered a clear and
punchy message to America’s highest earners on Wednesday: I’m going to raise
your taxes, but your vacation homes are safe.
اضافة اعلان
In an exchange with reporters at the White House,
Biden defended with gusto his plans to increase taxes on high earners and the
wealthy. He railed against high-earning CEOs and promised that his plans were
“about making the average multimillionaire pay just a fair share.”
“We’re not going to deprive any of these executives of their
second or third home, travel privately by jet,” Biden said after brief remarks
on an economic aid program he signed into law this year. “It’s not going to
affect their standard of living at all. Not a little tiny bit. But I can affect
the standard of living of people I grew up with.”
The comments were the latest example of Biden and his party
embracing the political and economic upsides of his proposals to tax the rich —
a fight that
the White House is eager to wage as the president engages in
bipartisan negotiations over his $4 trillion economic agenda and a contrast to
how Democratic presidents in the past have talked about their tax-increase
proposals.
Republicans and business groups have blasted Biden’s plans
to fund new spending on roads, bridges, low-carbon energy deployment, child
care, education and a host of other initiatives by raising taxes on
corporations, high earners and the wealthy. Biden has responded by amplifying
his arguments: In recent remarks, he has focused almost as much on the tax
increases as he has on the programs they would pay for.
Biden’s comments reflect both a read of public polling and a
negotiating tactic. He is presenting the tax increases not simply as a method
of paying for his sprawling agenda but as a policy goal on their own, aimed at
narrowing gaps in income and wealth that have been exposed in stark terms by
the coronavirus pandemic. He and his aides see a chance to turn the issue
against Republicans who have long preached tax cuts and hammered Democrats for
supporting any tax increases.
A wide range of polls now show broad public support for tax
increases on high earners. A Pew Research poll last week found that Americans
were much more likely to be upset that the wealthy and corporations did not pay
“their fair share” in taxes than to be upset about the size of their own tax
bills.
Republicans in Congress continue to warn that Biden’s tax
increases could cripple an economy that is just beginning to recover from the
pandemic downturn and hurt workers, even though the president has vowed not to
raise taxes on individuals or households earning less than $400,000. They say
that corporate tax increases will hurt business investment and growth and that
companies will pass some of those increases on to their workers in the form of
lower wages.
“Ultimately, his political standing is judged by the health
and well-being of the economy,” said Josh Holmes, a political adviser to Sen.
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “What he’s talking about
from a tax perspective is administration-assisted suicide.”
But Holmes agreed that, at least in the short term, Biden
was making a winning political calculation. “He’s right that corporate tax
increases are not unpopular,” Holmes said. But the political calculus for
Republicans is that the policies themselves will prove unpopular with American
voters by the midterm elections because of their effect on workers and the
economy, he said.
Independent forecasters largely expect the economy to boom
this year as the country reopens widely for economic activity on the strength
of COVID-19 vaccinations. Analyses vary on how Biden’s $4 trillion agenda could
affect that. Analysts at the Penn Wharton Budget Model predict the tax
increases would hurt growth, on balance. Wells Fargo forecasters wrote this
week that Biden’s infrastructure package, including the corporate tax increases
that would fund it, would increase growth in the coming years.
The fight in Washington over Biden’s plans is a continuation
of a battle that began under President Donald Trump, who signed a $1.5 trillion
tax cut package into law in 2017. Democrats successfully portrayed the cuts as
benefiting the rich, and they never reached the kind of public popularity that
Republican leaders envisioned. Republicans largely abandoned plans to focus on
the tax cuts during the 2018 midterm election campaigns.
“There were far more Democratic ads about it than there were
Republican ads,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
In many ways, those tax cuts have given Biden an
opportunity, Garin said.
“When Biden talks about the corporate tax rate, he frames it
in the context of rolling back the 2017 corporate tax cut as opposed to an
out-of-the-blue increase on corporations,” he said. “It’s clear from polling
that when you provide the context of the 2017 corporate tax cut, which most
voters feel was excessive and wasteful, support for the Biden proposal goes
even higher.”
White House officials also cite the 2017 law in explaining
their aggressive stance on the tax issue. “The pandemic laid bare huge
inequalities in this country,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser.
“Even before, the 2017 tax cut was very unpopular.”
In memos to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and political allies
obtained by The New York Times, Dunn outlined how raising taxes appeared to be
a winning political issue for the president. She noted a Fox News poll from
April that showed 56 percent of respondents favored paying for infrastructure
plans by increasing the tax rate on businesses and corporations. And she
flagged a Washington Post poll from last month that showed 58 percent of
respondents supported raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent.
In a second memo, she noted that some tax increases on the
wealthy were even supported by a majority of Republican voters.
Republicans and business groups have responded by mounting a
renewed defense of Trump’s tax cuts, casting them as the primary driver of
economic growth in 2018 and 2019. Growth accelerated in the first year after
the cuts were passed, but it decelerated in 2019, as many analysts had
predicted when the cuts were approved.
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