President Joe Biden didn’t put coal in our stockings for Christmas, but he is taxing the coal that heats our homes for the new year.
As Americans for Tax Reform noted this week, Biden and his fellow Democrats included the coal tax and numerous other new levies in legislation they passed this year, all of which take effect on Jan. 1. Many of the hikes will fall on energy, thus exacerbating inflationary pressures and making it more difficult for low-income earners to make it through a cold winter.
There’s a new tax on natural gas development, even though natural gas is a relatively clean-burning fuel. It could raise an average family’s natural gas prices by 17%. There’s a 16.4 cents-per-barrel tax on crude oil and imported petroleum products. The excise taxes on coal production will more than double.
Democrats think they will garner $74 billion for federal coffers through a new excise tax on ordinary people’s sales of stock back to the company that originally sold them. This surely will hurt union pension funds and 401(k) accounts, and it will drive up compliance costs for businesses as well. Then there’s a $225 billion hike in corporate income taxes that are likely to force either job layoffs or higher prices — or both — and hit particularly hard at manufacturing industries. Current supply chain problems, too, are likely to be made worse.
Some of these taxes directly violate Biden’s solemn, oft-repeated pledge not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000, and all of them almost certainly will do so, at least indirectly.
The tax hikes again show Biden to be deeply dishonest. They also show him to be economically idiotic. It’s hard to power the nation’s economic engine when one puts a wet blanket of taxes on the energy that makes the engine run.
