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TING SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
So much for President Biden’s pivot to the political middle. The fiscal 2023 budget he unveiled Monday re-proposes most of the bad ideas that haven’t passed Congress and adds a new one—a tax on wealth that he refused to endorse as a candidate in 2020. On the economy, he’s pivoting further left—presumably to fire up sullen progressives in November.
The White House is proposing a new “billionaire minimum income tax,” which the Federal Trade Commission would call false advertising if a private company tried that description. The tax isn’t limited to billionaires and it applies to more than income.
It’s a new tax on Americans with $100 million or more in assets whose effective tax rate in any year is less than 20% of their income. But these taxpayers already pay a 23.8% tax rate on capital gains and 37% on ordinary income. The average tax rate for the top 1% of taxpayers in 2019 was 25.6%.