You Thought Tax Day Was Bad? Biden Has Worse in Store

You could say “Happy Passover,” you could say “Happy Easter,” but you couldn’t really say “Happy Tax Day.” Tax Day is already bad, and President Joe Biden wants to make it worse.

If you filed for a refund, you may be waiting a while: As of March, the IRS hadn’t processed more than 12 million returns. The latest appropriations bill gave the agency funding to hire 10,000 more people, but that won’t solve the problem.

Biden wanted to give it a further $80 billion and hire another 87,000 agents. We already see IRS people chase waitresses around the table to tax their tips, run up and down city streets to make sure there’s no Uber hanky-panky and in their spare time go after successful small-business and gig workers.

That’s not enough for the president. Biden wants to make America No. 1 . . . in taxes.

If he had his way, the United States would have the highest individual, corporate and capital-gains taxes of all the developed nations. We’d have tax rates even higher than China’s.

And don’t forget his proposed confiscatory wealth tax on unrealized capital gains, which would be unconstitutional and impossible to calculate, besides being stupid.

Of course, Biden never acknowledges that under his tenure, Americans are already paying record taxes.

Just last week, Treasury announced it collected a whopping $2.1 trillion in taxes the first half of the fiscal year. It was the first time in history that tax collections exceeded $2 trillion in a six-month period. More than $1.1 trillion of that came from individual income tax.

You’d think that with record revenues, Biden would return some money to the working folks who earned it. Not a chance.

He wants to use it to expand his big-government regulatory state and control all aspects of the economy.

Instead of rewarding success, Biden and the Democrats want to punish it. They have no interest in economic growth. For them, tax policy is strictly a matter of class warfare and redistributionism.

But by hiking taxes on successful businesses and entrepreneurs, they reduce profits, which in turn reduces middle-class and blue-collar wages, increases consumer prices and throttles investor returns.

The left is always trying to tax the rich without realizing that you can’t be in favor of employees if you’re opposed to employers and you can’t support a system of capitalism without capital.

OK, Democrats aren’t always wrong about tax policy. One understood it well 60 years ago: John F. Kennedy.

So “long as our national-security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits,” he told the Economics Club of New York in 1962. “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

JFK had it exactly right. He was describing the Laffer curve before there was a Laffer curve.

And Kennedy was for growth, which should be the top goal of tax policy. He took the top rate from 91% to 70%.

Years later, former Democrat Ronald Reagan took the top rate from 70% to 28%. In fact, when Reagan left Washington, we had a two-bracket income tax: 28% and 15%. His reforms ripped 10,000 pages of tax regulations out of the Federal Register.

As tax rates were lowered, the tax base was broadened, and taxes were simplified. The JFK tax cuts launched a decade of tremendous prosperity. The Reagan tax cuts launched a two-decade prosperity cycle.

The Trump tax cuts are giving us what limited prosperity we have. Congress should make them permanent.

A pro-growth tax-cut plan that flattened rates, broadened the base and simplified the code could generate 3% to 4% economic growth. It’d be a crucial element in a balanced budget that also included a domestic discretionary-spending freeze and a rollback of all the nutty Biden regulations, especially on fossil fuels. That would be a growth budget.

Over the roughly 50 years between the end of World War II and 2000, the US economy grew at a 3.6% annual rate. In the new century, from 2000 to 2021, it’s grown by only half that: 1.8% annually.

Why? Too much spending, too much deficit finance, too much money printing, too much inflation, too many regulations, too much central planning, too much big-government socialism. And Biden wants to raise taxes so he can do more of the same.

It doesn’t have to be this way. America deserves better. America can do better—as it has proved in the past.