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brooklynite

(94,502 posts) Mon Sep 14, 2020, 08:23 AM Sep 2020

Biden going big on tax hikes on the rich

Politico

Democratic nominee Joe Biden last week made a point of saying he would raise taxes on corporations “one day one.” As we noted, this was more a rhetorical device than a real promise. Because he almost certainly can’t do that. But look for the former vice president to hammer away at higher taxes on both big corporations and wealthy individuals in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign.

MM wrote a while back that Americans increasingly support big new taxes on the wealthiest and corporate America. And those numbers are only getting stronger in the wake of a Covid-19 epidemic that has hit the less affluent the hardest, both in terms of health and economic impacts. Democrats know these polling numbers and also know that President Donald Trump is vulnerable on the issue given the 2018 tax cut.

And the general view at senior levels in the party is that there is much more political upside in hammering away on tax hikes than there is downside on being branded by Trump as a giant tax raiser. A decade of increasing income inequality made even worse by Covid leaves fertile ground to try and flip the narrow slice of undecided, blue collar swing state voters who increasingly see a narrow group of Americans pulling away from them and don’t feel the tax system is remotely fair.