No Debt Ceiling thumpers – taxes did not play a role in negotiations
Noah 5-31 [Timothy; New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.; 5-31-2023; "The Debt Ceiling Compromise Is a Missed Opportunity to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy"; New Republic; https://newrepublic.com/article/173098/debt-ceiling-raise-taxes-wealthy;]//LASA-بيلال
And finally: It’s not too early to regret that the deal doesn’t include a tax increase. Unlike during the last two big debt limit fights, in 2011 and 2013, Democrats never uttered the word “tax” out loud until negotiations were near an end. By then, it was too late.
At a May 10 appearance at SUNY Westchester Community College, Biden faulted Republicans for refusing to consider undoing $2 trillion in tax cuts enacted under President Donald Trump. These tax cuts are set to expire in 2025.
But that was a bluff. Although Biden said during the 2020 campaign, “I’m going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts,” after he became president he decided to eliminate Trump’s tax cut only for people earning in excess of $400,000 (to honor a different, very ill-advised, campaign promise). That whittled $2 trillion in savings down to about $500 billion, according to calculations by Jim Tankersley of The New York Times. So what Biden really meant at SUNY Westchester Community College was that Republicans refused to consider the $500 billion that Biden wants to save by canceling some of Trump’s tax cuts but holding harmless the supposed proletarians who earn hundreds of thousands a year short of $400,000.
Five days after the Westchester speech, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported that the Biden White House, on the down low, had handed House Republicans a list of proposals to close various tax loopholes and that the Republicans had said no. The Biden proposals included a commonsense prohibition against investors claiming a tax loss on a cryptocurrency asset that is quickly repurchased—something already prohibited for other financial assets—and a separate prohibition against deferring taxes on property swaps, aligning real estate with an existing prohibition against deferring taxes on tax swaps. Together these loophole-closings would, Stein calculated, have raised $40 billion over 10 years.
On May 21 the Biden administration went public with these, which the White House said in a tweet would save not $40 billion but $43 billion over 10 years. It also proposed $31 billion in additional savings over 10 years through the elimination of tax subsidies for oil and gas, plus $200 billion in savings over 10 years from some sort of expansion of the provision in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act that imposed various cost controls on drugs purchased by Medicare. This last wasn’t a tax-loophole-closer, exactly, but it was a revenue-raiser. Total savings would have totaled $274 billion over the next decade.