During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-Vice President Joe Biden vowed to roll back the tax cuts passed by Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump in 2017.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden pledged during a call with potential campaign donors on Monday that his administration would reverse the bulk of President Trump's tax cuts, even though "a lot of you may not like that."
"I'm going to get rid of the bulk of Trump's $2 trillion tax cuts, and a lot of you may not like that, but I'm going to close loopholes like capital gains and stepped-up basis," Biden said, according to a pool report of the virtual fundraiser.
The former vice president vowed to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, which he said is projected to raise $1.3 trillion over the next decade. The Trump administration permanently slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent with the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
But during a meeting at the White House Wednesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear President Biden's Green New Deal "infrastructure" plan won't pass unless President Trump's tax cuts stay.
MCCONNELL: I made clear to the President that we're not willing to go back and undo the 2017 comprehensive tax reform bill, which brought us the best economy. We need to discuss how big the bill would be and how we're going to pay for it. But not by raising taxes. pic.twitter.com/XYS8yZwU2u
— Senate Republican Communications Center (@SRCC) May 13, 2021
Contrary to arguments made by Biden and the Left, the Trump tax cuts benefited the vast majority of Americans. Even The New York Times knows that's the case.
Experts are divided on whether the tax law was a good idea. But there is little disagreement on this core point: Most people got a tax cut.
The Tax Policy Center estimates that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.)
Other analyses reached similar conclusions. The Joint Committee on Taxation — Congress’s nonpartisan team of tax analysts — found that every income group would see a tax cut on average. So did the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank that was sharply critical of the law. In fact, that group went even further: In a December 2017 analysis, it found that every income group in every state would pay less on average under the law in 2019.