Biden's government greed

 Stephen Moore:

President Joe Biden has just proposed the biggest federal budget request in U.S. history–with the exception of his near $7 trillion spent last year. When I came to Washington in 1985, the federal budget hit $1 trillion. Now, we are in the $6 trillion to $7 trillion range, and we wonder how it is that the debt has rocketed to $30 trillion.

The obvious solution—given the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in the budget and the end of special spending needs to combat COVID—would be to put government on a strict spending diet. Not only would this lower our deficit, it would mean a lower inflation rate as well.

Instead, Biden wants one of the largest tax increases in many years. All of this, he says, is aimed at millionaires and billionaires, but hopefully, voters aren’t gullible enough to fall for that gambit. That’s what they said about the original income tax (which now everyone pays), and the alternative minimum tax, which was supposed to be paid by a few hundred of the richest families but soon applied to more than a quarter of all taxpayers.

Biden says the rich need to pay more because they only cough up 8 percent of their income in taxes, which is a smaller percentage than a firefighter or a secretary pay.

That WOULD be an outrage, but it isn’t even in the same ZIP code as the truth. The top 1 percent of Americans in income pay 40 percent of the income tax—more than the bottom 90 percent. That’s a pretty progressive tax system.

A major proposal in the Biden tax plan is to tax “unrealized capital gains.” This is the buildup in the value of stock holdings, which isn’t “income” because the stock hasn’t been sold. It’s like saying you should pay more tax because your house appreciated in value—even though you still live in and own the house.

How can you pay tax on something that you haven’t gained any income on? Are shareholders—which is almost all of us—supposed to take out a loan to pay the taxes on unrealized capital gains?

Biden conveniently forgets to mention that there IS a tax on corporate earnings, which is called the corporate income tax—which is 21 percent. The capital gains tax is applied AFTER that tax is paid. Think of it as the U.S. government being a one-fifth shareholder in every company. The combination of the corporate and capital gains tax brings the effective tax rate on this income of millionaires and billionaires to above 35 percent.
...

When it comes to taxes Joe Biden lies a  lot or believes a lot of things that are not true.   His policy would kill a lot of jobs that would ordinarily be created by the rich whether through spending or investment.  It is clear that Elon Musk makes better business decisions than Joe Biden ever will.