President Joe Biden thinks middle-class families need relief while the wealthy and corporations need to start paying a bit more in taxes, a White House economic adviser said Tuesday.
Bharat Ramamurti, who served as a top economic policy adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren in her 2020 presidential campaign and now serves as deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, told Bloomberg TV that Biden’s tax proposals will focus on increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
“The president’s tax plan is intended to make sure that middle-class families are not paying more than their fair share and that the wealthiest folks, who by and large have done quite well over the last several years, including during the last year, are paying a little bit more,” Ramamurti said. “We hope to work with Congress to accomplish those goals.”
Ramamurti said that many middle-class families are hurting in the current environment and need the kind of assistance provided in Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. “A teacher and a nurse who collectively make, you know, $110,000, deserve relief,” he said. “And what we’ve seen in the data is that families with that kind of profile have suffered.”
One major question is whether the White House will push for any of the benefits in the relief legislation that help middle-class families, such as the expanded child tax credit, to become permanent. Ramamurti said that Biden is “interested at looking at that,” but no decisions have been made.
Familiar battle lines form: Meanwhile, Republicans are making it clear that although Biden and some centrist Democrats would like to make the next economic package a bipartisan affair, they have no interest in tax hikes to help pay for new spending on things like infrastructure. “I don’t think there’s going to be any enthusiasm on our side for a tax increase,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Tuesday.
McConnell predicted that Democrats would use the budget reconciliation process to pass their “Trojan horse” of a bill with a simple majority and no Republican support, sneaking tax hikes into legislation authorizing new spending on public goods.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida also took aim at Biden’s still-developing plan Tuesday, in terms we will likely hear repeatedly in the coming months. “The Biden-Harris administration is fulfilling its campaign promise to ram through job-killing tax hikes,” he said in a statement. “As folks across the nation recover from this economic crisis, the last thing they need is to send their hard-earned money to fund the Democrats’ big government agenda.”
That’s not to say that Republicans don’t have their own tax proposals, though. In stark contrast to burgeoning Democratic plans, Republicans are offering tax cuts for the wealthy instead. Last week, GOP senators reintroduced the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2021, which would permanently repeal the estate tax, a 40% levy currently applied only to estates worth more than $11.7 million, or twice that amount for couples.
