If President Joe Biden gets his way, the business of filing taxes in 2022 will be more complicated, more expensive, and more progressive than they’ve been in about 40 years.
Biden didn’t say much about taxes during the 2020 campaign besides his promise that those making less than $400,000 a year would not see their tax bill rise by “one thin dime.” The proposals he’s put forward as “payfors” for infrastructure, COVID relief, and other new spending programs are riddled with new taxes and hike existing levies to the point one can safely say the era of “tax and spend” has returned, in a punitive, almost vengeful way.
As the Committee to Unleash Prosperity observed Monday in its free daily Hotline, the top 5 percent of U.S. income earners pay half of all income taxes while the top 1 percent – the left’s favorite whipping post – pay more than 40 percent of the total tax intake. Meanwhile, as the chart below shows, the bottom half of income earners have an effective federal tax that’s close to zero – even when payroll and gasoline taxes are factored in. Quoting the Cato institute’s Chris Edward, “Joe Biden’s comments about the rich having low rates are clearly off base. The highest earners have tax rates twice the income of those in the middle and almost ten times the rates at the bottom.”
Biden’s plan to “soak the rich” is more about politics than economics. The numbers don’t add up and, if his tax cuts are enacted at the same time the United States is trying to emerge from a prolonged, lockdown induced recession, the results could be inflationary and job-killing rather than spark renewed growth in the economy as the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did. Nonetheless, the Democrats are, as a party, committed to TCJA’s repeal in its entirety and, in the process, violate Biden’s campaign pledge.
Republicans on the House Ways and means Committee said Monday that if Biden gets his way on TCJA, it will do families “real harm” even at the median income level. A family of four with a household income of $73,000 could expect to see its federal taxes increased by $2,000. A single parent with one child should plan to pay $1,300 more.
Additionally, the committee said, the child tax credit would be cut in half as would the standard deduction, millions of middle-class households would again have to pay the Affordable Care Act individual mandate tax, and the American corporate tax rate would once again become the highest in the industrialized world.
The policies of tax and spend reached their apex in the 1970s under Jimmy Carter. America literally can’t afford to go back. The inflation alone would have a potentially ruinous impact on government discretionary spending. No Democrat who claims to be a moderate could go along with Biden’s plan to undo any part of tax-cutting, job-creating law Congress passed in 2017 – especially given what the president has planned for phase two. The prudent force forward is to keep the rates where they are, reduce overall federal spending, and let the U.S. economy boom. There will be plenty of money later to do the things we’ve already put off doing over the last four years, economists say, once the country is flush again.