(John Ransom, Headline USA) President Biden, who was continually rebuffed last year in his attempts to raise taxes, even by members of his own party, has just announced a new billionaire tax that the administration estimates will lower the deficit by $360 billion over a 10 year period, or roughly $36 billion per year, said the Epoch Times.
“President Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax will make America’s tax code fairer and reduce the deficit by about $360 billion in just the next decade,” said the White House fact sheet, shared by The Epoch Times.
Biden to propose new ‘billionaire’s tax’ on richest Americans: report https://t.co/Vjksdwnvtq pic.twitter.com/OtC7786sPj
— New York Post (@nypost) March 26, 2022
But as CNBC points out, the new tax won’t just target billionaires.
The tax will target any household with a net worth of $100 million or more, said CNBC, with a 20 percent tax on all of the household’s income. However, it’s not clear from the proposal if the word income is used in the traditional sense, or if it means taxing unrealized capital gains each year, which are traditionally not counted as income.
The White House benchmark of households with net worth of $100 million or more to impose the tax suggests that the scheme will actually tax assets in addition to income, an idea that several Democrats have spoken out against forcefully.
“I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) told reporters last year about a version of the billionaire tax, according to the New York Times.
“There’s people that basically, they’ve contributed to society. They’ve created a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money, and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits,” Manchin added.
Last year, any legislation without Manchin’s support was dead-on-arrival, because Democrats hold the US Senate by the very narrowest of majorities.
However, the 2022 midterm elections are not supposed to be kind to Democrats, after having lost the statewide elections in Virginia, which are typically a good off-year barometer, according to Fortune, for how the midterms will go for each party.
The money raised for the federal government by Biden’s Billionaire tax would also be insignificant compared to the $14 billion the United States is expected to pay for the war in Ukraine so far, and the cost that the war is imposing on Americans in the form of inflation, said ABC News.
