WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will outline his administration’s goal of raising taxes on the wealthy to strengthen the middle class and boost the economy in remarks Thursday afternoon at the White House.
A White House official told NBC News that Biden will lay out “what’s at stake in the fight to ensure that our economy delivers for middle class families, and not only for those at the top.”
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“He’ll underscore that we’ve reached an inflection point where we have to choose whether or not we’re going to perpetuate an economy where the wealthiest taxpayers and biggest corporations get to play by a set of rules they’ve written for themselves, while middle-class families aren’t given a fair shot,” the official said.
Biden will argue that the U.S. can’t return to the way things were for the middle class before the coronavirus pandemic, the official continued.
“He’ll also argue that we don’t need to reduce the cost of being rich in America; we need to lower the cost of raising a child, of prescription drugs, of taking care of an aging parent, of health care, of high-speed internet and of hearing aids,” the official said.
The president plans to give the IRS tools to crack down on the wealthiest Americans who have evaded paying taxes, the White House said in a fact sheet about the plan. Biden plans to emphasize that his administration will protect Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
According to the fact sheet, the top 1 percent “chooses not to pay more than $160 billion in taxes” but “the IRS does not even have the resources to pursue evaders” due to budget cuts to the agency that were passed by Congress. Audit rates on those making over $1 million a year fell by 80 percent from 2011 to 2018, the White House said.
To deliver these changes, the president is counting on Congress to pass his infrastructure plan, which he has said would create millions of well-paying jobs, and the $3.5 trillion bill to implement his Build Back Better agenda to expand the social safety net. Democrats face an uphill climb to pass both pieces of legislation because of divisions between moderates and progressives.
Biden’s speech comes a few weeks after a weaker-than-expected jobs report from August, which he attributed to the delta variant that has become the dominant coronavirus strain nationwide. The House returns next week for the first time in about a month to continue work on the Democrats’ legislative agenda.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
