Will Biden’s Tax Hikes Hurt the Middle Class?

If there is one thing we’ve learned over the last ten months is that a lot of what we hear coming out of the White House is at best misleading. From the Biden border crisis misdirection, or a “challenge not a crisis” as the White House would like you to think, to the President’s $3.5 trillion spending proposal that he bizarrely insists “costs zero dollars” and “adds zero dollars to the national debt,” the pile-up of lies and misleading statements are becoming hard for even some on the left to ignore.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler reportedly said that Biden’s claim was “misleading,” after he gave the President “Two Pinocchio’s” and noted that the number of Pinocchio’s “could grow higher.” Now, it appears that the number of Pinocchio’s is indeed about to grow higher. The President tweeted, “I give you my word as a Biden: If you make under $400,000 a year, I’ll never raise your taxes one cent.” An interesting point to underscore as he releases 1700 pages of tax hikes on the American people. 

“Nearly 6 million taxpayers taking home less than $100,000 per year would see their taxes go up in 2023 under the Biden legislation,” the Heritage Foundation reported. Their fact check revealed much worse than what others have anticipated: That the President’s $400,000 income threshold a promise is contradicted by the policies released, and in fact, it will dramatically hike taxes on the middle and low-income classes directly and indirectly. The Biden plan “would even hike taxes on hundreds of thousands of families earning less than $20,000 per year.” If his plan is made law, Heritage reports that, by 2027, “more than half of all families earning $75,000 to $100,000 would see their taxes go up by a total of more than $3 billion.”

But was the President misled himself, or is he perpetuating this myth knowing it’s false? For someone who has been in government for the last 40 years, it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t know the effect of such a massive tax hike. 

“I challenge you to find an economist who will say that is even possible,” William McBride, vice president for federal tax and economic policy at the Tax Foundation, told CNBC. McBride’s reasoning is simple: everyone in the economy is connected. “If you raise tax on this taxpayer here, good luck in isolating that effect to just that taxpayer,” McBride says. “It’s not actually possible.” As a result of small business and corporate rates going up, both middle-class workers and consumers will be worse off. 

A recent report from Americans for Tax Reform indicates that Biden knows very well that he’s peddling misdirection on taxes because he’s done it before. “Joe Biden cannot be trusted when he says he won’t raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 per year. In addition to the fact that he has endorsed many tax increases on middle-class Americans during the past few months (re-imposition of the $695 – $2,085 individual mandate tax, repeal of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a carbon tax, and raising the capital gains tax on “every single solitary person,” so it is taxed at ordinary income tax rates) he also broke his tax pledge the last time around, betraying the American people.” It certainly doesn’t sound like Biden’s rhetoric matches the reality. 

When Biden was Vice President under President Obama, he again falsely stated in 2008, “No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama’s plan will see one single penny of their tax raised whether it’s their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.” That pledge was broken within a month of Obama taking office. 

Clearly, President Biden has a problem with the truth and a questionable track record on keeping tax pledges. The American people should be skeptical of this rhetoric, especially as inflation picks up and the economy continues to struggle with adding jobs. Now is not the time to hike taxes on the American people, especially under the clearly false guise of taxing only the rich. 

Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action