In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran for president proposing $1 trillion in tax increases. Would President Trump’s blue-collar boom ever have gotten off the ground with such a back-breaking tax burden?
But now, four years later, former vice president Joe Biden thinks he has a better idea. In his third run for the White House, Biden is proposing tax increases of nearly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. If he wins in November and these increases were to pass, they’d be the highest in American history — indeed, in world history.
President Trump’s 2017 tax reform cut taxes for corporations, small businesses, blue-collar workers and the middle class. Since the 2016 election, employers have added 7 million new jobs and, until the COVID-19 pandemic this spring, Trump’s tax reform package created an economy that produced the lowest unemployment in American history for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, along with increases in wages and middle-class incomes.
Are Biden’s proposed tax increases what America needs while our economy is still mired in the coronavirus downturn, and now beset by anti-police protests? What will happen to jobs under that farsighted “leadership”? How long until America’s economy could return to where it was at the beginning of 2020?
Biden proposes an outright repeal of Trump’s tax reform package, raising taxes on the middle class, blue-collar families and American corporations, large and small. Such tax increases would return America’s corporate tax rate to close to 40 percent, the highest in the world.
At the start of the Great Depression in 1929, President Hoover’s tax increases to balance the budget in a collapsing economy caused America to suffer 25 percent unemployment for more than 10 years. Is that what Americans want again?
And Biden also proposes to raise the capital gains tax to 40 percent, doubling it from today’s rate. We know from experience that would dramatically reduce tax revenues from that source and slash investment returns for all Americans.
Additionally, Biden proposes a “carbon tax” — a new form of gas tax — on America’s world-leading oil and natural gas production. And he has asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), architect of the Green New Deal, to co-chair his campaign on climate change.
Now that America is energy independent for the first time in 75 years, producing more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined, Biden proposes to return America’s energy production to oblivion. What price would gas be then for American motorists?
Biden’s tax increases would raise taxes on middle-class families by over $2,000 a year, with a $1,300 annual tax increase on a median-income, single parent with one child. Repealing Trump’s tax reform would cut in half the child tax credit and standard deduction, which currently help lower-income families the most.
There’s more: Biden proposes to reinstate the ObamaCare individual mandate tax, which hits lower-income and middle-class households the hardest, with an estimated bill of $695 to $2,085 per family. Most households paying that tax made less than $50,000 a year. Remember, Trump’s 2017 tax reform zeroed out that ObamaCare tax, to help working people.
And more yet: Biden also would increase the “death tax,” impose a new minimum tax on smaller businesses, and double the tax on overseas income. His new energy taxes would increase prices at the pump and utility bills.
That’s what Biden has been thinking about while campaigning virtually from his basement. Just wait until he fully emerges.
Who do you think would best bring America’s economy back from the coronavirus-related recession? Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)? Or Trump and the team that crafted the 2017 tax reform that has America’s economy already starting to come back again?
Lew Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He collaborated with Ronald Reagan and economist Milton Friedman in California and across the country.
Peter Ferrara is the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics at King’s College in New York, and senior policy adviser to NTLF. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as associate deputy U.S. attorney general under President George H.W. Bush.