Thursday, March 05, 2020

The Biden Tax Plan

The Tax Policy Center has released its report on Joe Biden's tax plan.

Most noteworthy is the huge increase in taxes on high-income households. The top one percent would see a 40 percent increase in federal taxes (all federal taxes combined). Their average federal tax rate would rise from 29.7 to 41.7 percent.

If enacted, this plan would give us the most redistributionist tax code in many years. For comparison, in 1979, as the Reagan tax revolution was starting to pick up steam as a political movement, the tax rate for the top one percent was 35.1 percent--a rate that has never been reached since.

By contrast, the middle quintile under the Biden plan would pay a federal tax rate of 13.5 percent, which is about the same as it has paid in recent years and much lower than the 19.1 percent rate it paid in 1979.