WH, Dems tangle over taxes hike bid
WASHINGTON, Sept 11, (AP): President Joe Biden has a simple message for fellow Democrats about his plan to raise taxes to remake large swaths of the American economy: look beyond the bottom line.
Biden is trying to persuade Democrats to embrace a more emotional argument, namely that the plan is fair, that it increases taxes on those who can afford to pay more and spends money on programs targeting children and the middle class.
The president has proposed more than $3 trillion worth of revenue increases, primarily through higher taxes for corporations and the country’s richest households as well as greater IRS enforcement that would target the wealthy. But key lawmakers voiced doubts this past week about the size and possible impacts on the economy as congressional committees considered the measures and a wide array of business groups sifted through the details to highlight what they oppose.
Interviews with three administration officials suggest the White House is comfortable with settling for a lower price tag as part of the negotiating process, so long as the end result produces a tax system that voters judge as fair. The officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss ongoing negotiations and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Democrats are united on this front.
If the playbook of appealing to voters sounds familiar, it was the same strategy used by Biden to cement a bipartisan infrastructure deal earlier this year.
“This is a commonsense thing that people agree with,” said Kate Berner, White House deputy communications director. “They don’t understand why companies can park profits overseas and pay no money in taxes. They don’t understand why a hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a pipefitter. It’s something that people think of as fundamentally broken.”
Uncertainty
But in a sign of uncertainty, the administration has also stayed publicly quiet about how low Biden is willing to go in slimming down the package. The administration also finds itself grappling with interest groups that the White House views as intentionally misrepresenting its tax plans in hopes of eroding support. Officials say that claims of job losses by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups are overblown and fail to consider investments in family leave, children, child care, health care and the environment that they believe will help the economy.
The president outlined his tax plans in his budget proposal, setting a baseline for congressional committees. But some Democratic lawmakers, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, have already objected to the amount of spending and the taxes being raised. Manchin early on raised concerns about Biden’s proposal to increase the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%.
“If you’re going to be a leader in the world and the superpower of the world, you better have a competitive tax rate, period,” he said.
While Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., both voted for the budget blueprint that allowed Democrats to begin crafting the social programs package, they have made it clear they will not support the proposed topline spending figure of $3.5 trillion over 10 years.
“Establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and then reverse-engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn’t how you make good policy,” Manchin wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
On the House side, Democrats can afford to lose only three votes and still pass the spending bill if the GOP unanimously opposes it, as expected. There have already been early signals of unrest, with Rep. Stephanie Murphy, DFla., voting against two sections of her party’s bill during a committee hearing this past week, and Rep. Ron Kind, DWis., joining her in voting no on one of those votes. “I don’t know how much we’re spending, how much we’re raising, how we’re spending some of the money and how we’re raising any of the money,” Murphy complained.