President Joe Biden claimed on the campaign trail that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $400,000 annually, but his administration now admits that the number could actually be much lower with tax hikes on the horizon.
A tax increase is coming for some individuals and for major corporations, just as was expected from Biden and Democrats. The federal government needs more funds to ramp up its planned spending, which includes another round of massive legislation. This opens up a big opportunity for the GOP, but we’ll get to that later.
Bloomberg reported this week: “Unlike the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus act, the next initiative, which is expected to be even bigger, won’t rely just on government debt as a funding source. While it’s been increasingly clear that tax hikes will be a component — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said at least part of the next bill will have to be paid for, and pointed to higher rates — key advisers are now making preparations for a package of measures that could include an increase in both the corporate tax rate and the individual rate for high earners.”
Corporations can expect to see them paying more of their “fair share,” which is of course language commonly used by Democrats who are seeking a polite way to say they want someone to pay for their ever-expanding welfare state.
Most of these companies arguably can, and should, pay more taxes at this point. Why not? Corporate America helped to promote the country’s neo-Marxist, race-obsessed “equality” revolution/movement all of last year and throughout this year. Why not let them all fund Democratic pipe dreams for a while?
FedEx, for example, pressured the then-Washington Redskins to change their name last summer. That team is now blandly known as the Washington Football Team. Thanks, Big Business. Why are Republicans in Washington always protecting companies like FedEx from Democratic taxation, again?
Such love affairs between corporations and the GOP might soon end, we’re told.
The influential conservative CGCN Group lobbyists, citing a potential coming death knell to establishment GOP politics, issued a letter warning that corporate America might no longer be able to step on culture and conservatives while simultaneously expecting the Republican Party to defend its business interests from the Democrats they align with, now that the party is America-first.
“For decades, that coalition reliably fought what they viewed as big government, anti-free-market policies. Along with conservative talk radio and think tanks, it comprised the heart of the GOP,” CGCN Group wrote. “What does that mean for tax policy, and much else? For one thing, a party that once made cutting corporate income taxes a standard policy trope may be fading from view.
“Trump may be out of office, but his legacy, which GOP members indelibly embraced through letters, press releases, votes, and op-eds, lives on. In good measure thanks to Trump (and his U.S. Trade Representative, Bob Lighthizer), the GOP no longer accepts the inevitable tradeoffs of free trade and globalization.”
Let major corporations all pay more — who cares? Ford couldn’t wait 60 days after former President Donald Trump left office before it announced it will ship American jobs to Mexico this week.
But what about tax hikes for loyal, high-earning individual Americans? Those people, per Biden on the stump, would not be affected if they made $400,000 or less annually.
Let me be very clear: If you make under $400,000 you won’t pay a penny more in taxes under my administration.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 16, 2020
“I will raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000,” Biden told ABC News anchor David Muir in August. He was clear that “no new taxes” would arise for people making less than that amount.
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The White House doubled down on that pledge on Monday of this week after Yellen’s comments.
“The president remains committed to his pledge from the campaign that nobody making under $400,000 a year will have their taxes increased,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, according to an official White House transcript of her remarks.
We know that pledge was a lie, as were Psaki’s empty words. She was forced to clarify that statement Wednesday after she was asked at her daily media briefing if Biden meant “individuals or households” with regard to how Biden’s campaign rhetoric correlated to Yellen’s statements.
“On the president’s interview, he said, on taxes, that ‘Anybody making more than $400,000 will see a small to a significant tax increase.’ To clarify, did he mean individuals or households? Because it wasn’t very clear. And Secretary Yellen, I think, has referred to ‘households’ before.”
Psaki’s response was short.
“Families,” she said, according to the briefing transcript.
Biden’s pledge was a bit of linguistic gymnastics. “Anybody” does not refer to individuals in Democrat-land. That term now means “families,” and that includes families that have two earners who manage to earn $200,000 or more annually per worker. High-wage-earning families making more than $400,000 are about to be paying more during an economic crisis and a pandemic, and Biden lied about it.
This is all the more reason for the GOP to abandon the “woke” likes of FedEx, Ford and others and embrace normal, hardworking taxpayers in the years to come. It’s beyond time for the conservative movement to sever its relationship to leftist big business and focus on supporting individual taxpayers and small businesses so they can grow. Until corporate America embraces American values, Republicans in Washington should allow those people to watch their profits shrink while they’re ravaged by Democratic tax hikes.
If leftist corporate America wants to embrace being American or simply not un-American at some point, a conversation should be had about the GOP again indulging them by creating the kind of environment needed for them, too, to be unburdened by high tax rates.
But GOP candidates in 2022 and 2024 should run on an economic agenda that aligns them with the everyday Americans who will by then have paid dearly for Biden’s lie about coming tax rate increases for successful individuals. It’s too late to save these people from the plundering of their bank accounts for now. In the next election, though, conservatives can officially become the party of all working people and small businesses.
Those Americans who Biden said would be immune from overtaxation could be key in securing a winning coalition for Republicans at the ballot box, and they’ll tragically be worse off by the time people start showing up at the polls in November and in 2024.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
