The $3.4 trillion tax cut Republicans passed in 2017 is expiring next year, and convicted felon Donald Trump is trying to win over corporate America by promising even more potentially disastrous cuts. President Joe Biden and a key lawmaker, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are setting out a progressive and fair vision in sharp contrast.
Warren highlighted that fight in a major speech Monday at a tax policy event at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She urged fellow Democrats to “stiffen our spines” in the fight over those expiring tax cuts.
“A little money for poor children or a modest tax cut for middle-class families is still a lousy deal when we can’t fund childcare or infrastructure because the wealthiest among us are still sucking up billions in tax breaks,” she said in prepared remarks.
“Better to let all the Trump tax cuts expire than be accomplices to another slash-and-burn tax bonanza for America’s billionaires.”
She and Biden have a common goal: “At the end of the 2025 tax reform process, large corporations must pay higher taxes. A typical billionaire must pay a higher tax rate than a typical middle-class family. Wealthy tax cheats must be sweating because the IRS has enough money to enforce the law.”
Biden is advocating raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, from the 21% established in the Trump tax plan, and letting the cuts for the wealthy in that law expire. He has vowed to protect those who earn less than $400,000 annually from any tax hikes.
Contrast that to Trump, who promised a bunch of CEOs more corporate tax breaks in a meeting last week. That might have been music to their ears, even though a number of participants came out of that meeting saying that Trump “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.
“At one point, he discussed his plan to bring the corporate tax rate down from 21% to 20% … and was asked about why he had chosen 20%,” Sorkin said.“And he said, ‘Well, it’s a round number.’”
“That unto itself had a number of CEOs shaking their heads,” Sorkin reported.
Trump also speculated with GOP lawmakers last week about replacing the income tax with tariffs, which could cause consumer prices to skyrocket.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen panned the idea Sunday: “It would require tariffs well over 100%,” Yellen said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The impact would be to make life unaffordable for working class Americans and would harm American businesses.”
Warren’s speech comes ahead of a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee—she’s an influential member—later this week to set their tax agenda for 2025.
Hopium Chronicles’ Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
