President Joe Biden nestled several eye-popping proposals into his latest budget request. Yet few, especially liberals’ wish list taxes on the wealthiest people, stand a chance of making it to the final bill approved by Congress.
The request further exemplifies a strategy Biden employed to secure him the White House in 2020 and is already hinting at using ahead of the 2022 midterm elections: promising progressive policy but governing as an establishment, donor-class Democrat.
Biden’s budget, which includes $5.8 trillion in new spending, would yield historic reductions in the deficit by placing taxes of 20% on all income and unrealized gains earned by billionaires, raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, and more, according to the White House.
However, an analysis carried out by the Tax Foundation found that the new taxes will do very little to “boost economic growth or result in sound fiscal policy.”
“At a time when the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to combat the highest inflation this country has seen in 40 years, which will slow the economy by raising borrowing costs, we should expect a more serious budgetary effort that recognizes the very real economic challenges that lie ahead,” the think tank added in a statement.
A slew of polls shows that voters of both parties are overwhelmingly focused on the economy heading into the midterm elections. Meanwhile, far-left Democrats are also frustrated with Biden and party leadership’s lack of concrete steps to close the wealth gap.
An aide for a progressive congressman told the Washington Examiner that Democratic voters, who polls are already indicating will not turn out in the same record numbers as the 2020 general election, won’t reward “half-assed” attempts to make good on campaign pledges.
“It’s starting to feel like more of the same,” explained the aide, who was promised anonymity in order to speak freely about the party’s future. “We elected this administration to bring about real change. If our current leaders can’t get the job done, we’ll vote others in who can. That’s politics.”
While Biden’s tax proposals deliver Democrats hand-crafted talking points to ease those rising anxieties within the base, the administration won’t have to deal with their negative impacts on the economy,
West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin announced just one day after the White House released the budget that he would not vote for Biden’s new taxes, which, in an evenly divided Senate just months out from an election, is as good as a death sentence.
“You can’t tax something that’s not earned. Earned income is what we’re based on,” Manchin said in a statement. “Everybody has to pay their fair share, that’s for sure. But unrealized gains is not the way to do it, as far as I’m concerned.”
In reality, Manchin’s consistent opposition to Biden’s “liberal agenda” has given Biden a gray area to play in, letting the president verbally side with progressives on policy he has been skeptical of in the past.
In 2021, Manchin outright refused to endorse abolishing the filibuster to help Democrats pass voting rights legislation. Though his position was highly similar to Biden’s own, namely that Republicans could take advantage of amended rules to roll back legislation should they retake the majority, Manchin was publicly harassed by liberal activists at the Capitol, at his houseboat in Washington, and in print.
Yet when Biden started 2022 with a renewed pledge to get voting rights done this year, even if it required filibuster reform, Manchin would not budge.
“Allowing one party to exert complete control in the Senate with only a simple majority will only pour fuel onto the fire of political whiplash and dysfunction that is tearing this nation apart — especially when one party controls both Congress and the White House,” he said in direct response to Biden’s flip. “As such, and as I have said many times before, I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”
A senior Democratic official denied to the Washington Examiner that Biden was using Manchin as a foil to frame his policies as more progressive than they are.
“Two of our own members are stopping the president from fully implementing the agenda he promised on the campaign trail,” the official explained. “Just because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have joined Republicans to kill some of his more ambitious proposals, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t stop trying to help working families by growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”
Still, another section looks at Biden’s true governing agenda. Since 2020, Biden has consistently sought to shake the “defund the police” stigma embraced by some progressive members of his party, and midterm election polling suggests that, as with the economy, voters of both parties are increasingly worried about violent crime.
Toward that end, Biden’s budget includes a more than $30 billion investment to combat rising crime across the country. That includes surging grants to local law enforcement offices to arm police and put more officers on the beat.
“Political reality just didn’t support the expansive view of progressive possibilities,” explained Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Clinton administration official. “If you put an ideological template on it, you have to say the correction is to the center.”
