After President Biden revealed his $6.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2024, one tax reform activist is sounding off on the “massive increase” in spending and taxes that brings the U.S. economy back to a “horrific” Jimmy Carter era.
“We already are approaching Jimmy Carter’s inflation with the same policies. Now he’s going to give us Jimmy Carter lack of growth with a capital gains tax, which was viewed as so horrific that a bipartisan Republican and Democrat Congress beat Carter and cut it almost in half. That’s how bad it was,” Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist said on “Mornings with Maria” Friday.
The president laid out an array of tax hikes Thursday as part of his sweeping budget blueprint for federal spending in fiscal 2024, which begins in October. The higher taxes would be borne largely by Wall Street and the top sliver of U.S. households.
Income tax, capital gains tax, corporate tax and corporate stock buyback tax will see increases ranging from just over 2% to 300%. Biden is also pushing for a “billionaire tax,” or a 25% minimum tax rate for U.S. households worth more than $100 million, or about 0.01% of Americans.
BIDEN BUDGET WOULD LEAD TO ‘RECORD’ NATIONAL DEBT, WATCHDOG WARNS
“It takes the corporate income tax higher than China’s,” Norquist warned. “It takes the individual income tax, which is paid by many of these small businesses that pass through organizations, up almost to 40%. This is going to hit many, many small businesses, many, many independent contractors… This is an assault on small and medium businesses.”
Reacting to Biden’s speech in Philadelphia Thursday evening touting the budget, the tax expert further criticized: “Your life savings will be torpedoed by Biden’s tax increases. He likes to talk about spending, and what was scary, I thought, in his talk, he said: You know how the government grows? The government spends money, is what he just said in that little bit. He seems to think if the government spends money, you get rich. He’s never visited Argentina.”
Under Democratic President Carter Americans saw inflation soar to more than 14% by 1980 as a result of high energy prices after the 1979 gas shortage. The Carter administration then struggled to get inflation under control, and the Fed brought rates up to 17%, triggering the recession of 1980.
The Democrats today now want to go back to what they recognized as “stupid and destructive in 1978,” the tax activist added.
“Your stock portfolio, your 401(k), your IRA,” Norquist mentioned, “what’s very interesting is that the president repeatedly said: Look, I’m never going to raise taxes on small business. It was one of his promises. The other was he’d never raise taxes on anyone who made less than $400,000. This set of taxes does all that.”
“It is going to be devastating to people trying to save for their future, trying to sell a house, to hold land stocks. This is a very, very damaging attack on people’s ability to save for their future,” he said.
Norquist further ripped Biden’s budget as a “political ploy,” calling on House Republicans to push back on the tax and spending “spree.”
“We got a lot 10 years ago when we negotiated with Obama, we took spending down $2.4 trillion over a decade,” the Americans for Tax Reform president said. “We need to do something along those lines. And Biden negotiated that agreement, so he understands that it can be done.”
Also on “Mornings with Maria” Friday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., shot down Biden’s budget, saying “anybody who’s took Economy 101 would know this is the wrong approach.”
“He’s been more than a month late with producing this budget,” McCarthy called out. “We’ve got an economy worried about whether we’re going to go downward, and he wants to take taxes. That’s all he ever wants to do to create the biggest government we’ve ever had.”
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