Saturday, March 7, 2020

Let’s Talk About Biden’s Tax Plan

Barkley Rosser elevates the political debate by trying to find common ground regarding health care reform. I posted a link to an interesting tax proposal, which I want to mention briefly after acknowledging this comment:
As to Biden's fiscal plan, I'm assuming this is really Jared Bernstein's plan. Biden has a lot of virtues, but he's never been known for being the smartest guy in the room. And with age he's definitely lost a step. Sometimes I listen to him and wonder if he hasn't had a few mini-strokes. But whatever his faults, he does seem to have a knack for surrounding himself with smart folks, and Jared Bernstein is clearly one of the smart guys...a trained sociologist who is also an accomplished economist.
OK I get the Twitter and Facebook is lit up with pathetic attacks on Biden’s mental health. I hope this is not coming from the “Bernie Brothers” as this is the kind of garbage we expect from MAGA wearing hat stooges and those people in Moscow who are hoping to re-elect President Stooge. But 2slugbaits raises a good point about who one’s economic advisers. After all, Trump selects people like Lawrence Kudlow as his chief economic advisor so President Stooge can pretend to be the smartest person in the room. For a recovering Republican, Greg Mankiw elevated our political debate:
Most noteworthy is the huge increase in taxes on high-income households. The top one percent would see a 40 percent increase in federal taxes (all federal taxes combined). Their average federal tax rate would rise from 29.7 to 41.7 percent. If enacted, this plan would give us the most redistributionist tax code in many years. For comparison, in 1979, as the Reagan tax revolution was starting to pick up steam as a political movement, the tax rate for the top one percent was 35.1 percent--a rate that has never been reached since. By contrast, the middle quintile under the Biden plan would pay a federal tax rate of 13.5 percent, which is about the same as it has paid in recent years and much lower than the 19.1 percent rate it paid in 1979.
The Tax Policy Center notes:
In this brief, we estimate the revenue and distributional effects of former vice president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign tax proposals. Biden’s spending proposals would also have important distributional and economic effects, but we have not estimated the distributional effects of those initiatives. Our modeling assumptions are based on information released by the Biden campaign and conversations with its staff; we detail these assumptions in appendix B. We analyze Biden’s proposals as of February 23, 2020. Biden would increase income and payroll taxes on high-income individuals and increase income taxes on corporations. He would increase federal revenues by $4.0 trillion over the next decade. Under his plan, the highest-income households would see substantially larger tax increases than households in other income groups, both in dollar amounts and as share of their incomes.
The political debate should focus on Biden’s fiscal proposals in contrast to Sander’s fiscal proposals. And following up on what 2slugbaits suggested, I would like to see who Biden is using as his economic advisers as well as who Sanders is using as his economic advisers.

7 comments:

2slugbaits said...

pgl,
Just to be clear, I don't want to be confused with one of the Bernie Bros when I pointed out Biden's apparent mental decline. He's still a lot smarter than Trump, but then again, so is a goldfish. As I said, Biden has strengths and weaknesses. One of his weaknesses is that he's probably no more than slightly above average in intelligence. But that's okay if a President has a knack for surrounding himself or herself with sharp cookies. And Biden seems to have that knack, as shown when he picked Jared Bernstein as his economic adviser back when Biden was the VP. FDR is another example of someone who might have been a little dull and in obvious decline, but knew how to find superstars. Same thing with JFK. And then there was Richard Nixon, who was very smart...and look what we got!

Anonymous said...

FDR is another example of someone who might have been a little dull and in obvious decline...

[ Rubbish, absolute rubbish. ]

Anonymous said...

FDR is another example of someone who might have been a little dull and in obvious decline...

[ What a thoroughly fALSE and rotten comment. Try listening to FDR, just try. ]

2slugbaits said...

Anonymous,
You have an almost uncanny ability to completely misunderstand and take out of context almost anything that anyone on the blog says. It's truly amazing. I am a big fan of FDR. He was one of the two or three greatest presidents we've ever had. My (what I thought was a fairly obvious) point was that you don't have to be a towering genius to be a great president. There is widespread agreement that FDR was not particularly smart academically. Here's what his Wikipedia entry says:

Roosevelt was an average student academically,and he later declared, "I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong." He was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and the Fly Club, and served as a school cheerleader. Roosevelt was relatively undistinguished as a student or athlete, but he became editor-in-chief of The Harvard Crimson daily newspaper, a position that required great ambition, energy, and the ability to manage others.

FDR was never the smartest kid in the class, but he was very ambitious and had a great talent for picking super smart subordinates and he had first rate executive skills. And his physical decline during the war can hardly be denied.

Anonymous said...

FDR is another example of someone who might have been a little dull and in obvious decline...

[ This is pernicious rubbish. Get it? ]

ilsm said...

Dean Baker on former VP Biden's plans to cut spending:

https://cepr.net/wanting-to-cut-social-security-along-with-everything-else-is-still-wanting-to-cut-social-security/

I do not want SS 'on the table'.

pgl said...

ilsm - relax. I would take Soc. Sec. off the table but to be clear, Dean Baker's latest was going after some "fact checker". But there is nothing in what Biden is putting forward in 2020 that suggests he wants to cut Soc. Sec. Nothing at all. In fact the tax proposals would significantly raise Federal revenues collected from the very well to do.