Zachary Halaschak of the Washington Examiner assesses the president’s latest budget plan.
The Biden White House has said it wants to keep Trump tax cuts for the middle class after they expire, but the latest budget doesn’t offer a plan on what specific tax hikes will be pursued to pay for that massive cost to the Treasury.
And the amount needed to offset the tax cuts is huge, in the trillions of dollars.
The Biden budget, revealed on Monday, features $7.3 trillion in spending and $5.5 trillion in tax revenue for fiscal 2025, bringing the deficit for the year to nearly $1.8 trillion. It also includes plans for new spending programs and new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals over the next decade.
But it is also notable for what it leaves out. Namely, it is missing budget projections showing how the administration’s plan to renew a huge chunk of the Trump tax cuts would affect the country’s fiscal footing and how the White House plans to pay for it.
The backstory is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, also known as the Trump or Republican tax cuts, was passed in 2017 and overhauled the tax code for corporations and people.
For procedural reasons, Republicans made it so that the individual provisions in the legislation were temporary, set to expire in 2025.
If the individual provisions under TCJA expire, most middle-class people would see a net tax hike, something that is politically unpalatable to both Republicans and Democrats.
Republicans are campaigning on winning the 2024 elections and re-upping their signature tax law.
The White House, on the other hand, is in a trickier position.
Biden campaigned on and has repeatedly vowed not to raise taxes on any people earning less than $400,000 annually. While the president is seeking to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, the White House has said it would push to keep the tax cuts for the middle class. It is also aiming to further enlarge the child tax credit, which the GOP tax law expanded.
