White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that President Biden is focused on making wealthy individuals and corporations pay their “fair share” in taxes as talks heat up on Capitol Hill about how to pay for new spending priorities in areas like infrastructure and climate change.
“His priority and focus has always been on people paying their fair share and also focusing on corporations that may not be paying their fair share, either,” Ms. Psaki told reporters at the White House. “So that remains his overarching approach, but there isn’t a package yet where we’re talking about pay-fors yet.”
Ms. Psaki reiterated Mr. Biden‘s pledge from the campaign trail that people earning less than $400,000 per year won’t see their taxes increase under his tax proposals.
She said Mr. Biden is generally aligned with the attitude of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts that wealthier people are not “doing their part” on paying taxes.
Ms. Warren recently introduced a “wealth tax” proposal she had pushed during the 2020 campaign that would impose a 2% tax on households’ net worth of more than $50 million and an additional 1% tax on net worth of above $1 billion.
Ms. Psaki said Mr. Biden laid out his own tax proposals during the campaign but that he shares Ms. Warren’s general sentiment on taxing the rich.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signaled over the weekend that the administration is eyeing ways to try to tame federal deficits like hiking taxes on corporations and wealthier individuals. Those items could potentially come as part of an infrastructure package congressional Democrats are eyeing.
Mr. Biden had campaigned on increasing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, raising the top individual tax rate from 37% to 39.6%, and increasing capital gains taxes on people who earn more than $1 million per year.
Republicans have long signaled that they will oppose any efforts to roll back parts of the 2017 tax-cut law, which decreased the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and cut individual tax rates across the board.
The GOP says now is the last time to be talking about tax increases, as many businesses and families struggle to recover from coronavirus-related lockdowns.
