Details and Analysis of President Joe Biden’s Campaign Tax Plan
What has President Joe Biden proposed in terms of tax policy changes? Our experts provide the details and analyze the potential economic, revenue, and distributional impacts.
The United States has long been a forward-thinking country that builds for tomorrow through saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. Saving gives us security, investment gives us rising incomes through enhanced productivity, and entrepreneurship drives economic growth and dynamism, creating new opportunities.
However, over the last fifty years, all three have been eroded. Citizens aren’t saving enough, businesses aren’t investing enough, and the country is undergoing a retreat in the level of economic growth and dynamism.
As it is, the U.S. tax code places substantial burdens on each of these essential factors of our economy. What’s worse, while other nations have become more attractive, there has been a proliferation of proposals in the U.S. that would only cause further harm—wealth taxes, “mark-to-market” capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and financial transaction taxes.
Below, we offer in-depth analysis of these and other proposals, which highlight a harmful trend in tax policy. Americans are industrious, entrepreneurial, and innovative. Policymakers should ensure we have a tax code that enhances those qualities, not hinders them.
What has President Joe Biden proposed in terms of tax policy changes? Our experts provide the details and analyze the potential economic, revenue, and distributional impacts.
New modeling finds that the wealth taxes proposed by Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders would raise significantly less revenue than promised, face serious administrative and compliance challenges, and would increase foreign ownership of U.S. capital.
A key element of America’s dynamism problem is a drop in entrepreneurship. Removing tax barriers for entrepreneurs would improve America’s dynamism while making America’s tax code more neutral, efficient, and simple for all taxpayers.
Capital gains taxes create a burden on saving because they are an additional layer of taxes on a given dollar of income. The capital gains tax rate cannot be directly compared to individual income tax rates, because the additional layers of tax that apply to capital gains income must also be part of the discussion.
The success of any mark-to-market system lies in its ability to accurately value tangible and non-tangible (or non-tradable) assets such as intellectual property and brand-value recognition. Administrative regulations, guidance, and enforcement are the Achilles’ heel of any plan to annually tax accrued gains.
Policymakers should exercise caution in deciding whether to enact an FTT given the uncertainty regarding the FTT’s ability to raise revenue and the significant damage it could cause to the U.S. financial system
Given that wealth taxes collect little revenue and have the potential to disincentivize entrepreneurship and investment, perhaps European countries should repeal them rather than implement one across the continent.
Making expensing permanent is especially important now, when the economy is threatened with a recession and inflation remains high.
Tax reform should be about increasing fairness. And the way to get there is by reducing complexity and double taxation, not by doubling down on them.
When peeling back layers of the JCT report, it becomes clear that many tax expenditures are not “loopholes” or benefits for narrow special interests, but important structural elements of the tax code.
President Biden’s State of the Union Address outlined three tax proposals, including raising the tax on stock buybacks, imposing a billionaire minimum tax, and expanding the child tax credit.
In a coordinated effort, lawmakers in seven states that collectively house about 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Washington—are introducing wealth tax legislation on Thursday.
The year-end omnibus federal spending package makes a number of reforms to retirement savings accounts.
The proposals share a common goal of improving incentives for households to save during a time when inflation is impacting their finances.
As part of President Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023, the White House has once again endorsed a major tax increase on accumulated wealth, adding up to a 61 percent tax on wealth of high-earning taxpayers.
Recent discussions of a proposed wealth tax for the United States have included little information about trends in wealth taxation among other developed nations. However, those trends and the current state of wealth taxes in OECD countries can provide context for U.S. proposals.