President Biden has called for raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but according to a new analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, he has been a net tax cutter so far.
In an analysis prepared for The New York Times, the non-partisan think tank found that the president’s tax cuts – which include tax breaks designed to encourage investments by businesses and to reduce the cost of energy-efficient products such as electric cars for individuals – outweigh his tax increases, which include a new tax on stock buybacks and a minimum corporate income tax.
Tallying up both the cuts and the increases, and the net change in federal revenue comes to a loss of about $600 billion over four years, relative to the baseline. The perhaps surprising result is due in large part to a simple political fact: Biden has been unable to pass much of his fiscal agenda, especially when it comes to increasing corporate taxes.
The Times’s Jim Tankersley said the analysis indicates that much of the political rhetoric around Biden’s fiscal policies misses the mark. “It is clear by that measure that his record has not matched his own ambitions for taxing the rich and big companies — or Republicans’ attempts to caricature him as a tax-and-spend liberal,” he wrote Monday.
