The Patriot Post® · Debunking Biden's 'Billionaire' Tax Canard

The effort to pit one group of Americans against another was classic Joe Biden. Just like when he told a largely black audience in Virginia in 2012 that Mitt Romney was “gonna put y'all back in chains.”

Or when he told radio personality Charlamagne the God in 2020 that “you ain’t black” if you don’t vote for him.

Or when he told an almost exclusively black audience at Howard University last year that “white supremacy … is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland.”

But it’s not just race that Joe Biden uses to divide us; he also uses wealth.

“Look, folks,” he said earlier this month in his folksy way, “you know how many billionaires we have in America today? One thousand. You know what their average rate — tax rate — federal tax rate is? Federal tax rate is 8.5%. Raise your hand if you’d trade your tax rate for 8.5%. I’m serious. Think about this. There’d be $40 billion raised if they even pay 25%.”

Only trouble is, it’s not true. Even Glenn Kessler says it’s not true.

Kessler, The Washington Post’s hard-left “fact-checker” of record, decided he’d throw his dozens of readers for a loop by actually training his sights on a sitting Democrat president rather than some obscure Republican back-bencher. This is uncomfortable territory for Kessler, who’d much rather be rescuing virtuous Democrats from the scurrilous charges of shameless Republicans — such as the time when he heroically scrounged through Federal Aviation Administration records to determine that then-President Bill Clinton hadn’t in fact delayed any scheduled arrivals or departures when he decided, right there on the tarmac, that he just had to have a haircut. But we digress.

As for those easy-to-demonize tax-cheating billionaires, Kessler notes that Biden has routinely rolled out this canard of late — more than 30 times during the past year alone. “He said it in his last State of the Union address,” said Kessler, “and odds are he will say it again when he addresses Congress in March.”

Unfortunately for Scranton Joe, his claim is as full of holes as Kid Rock’s case of Bud Light. As Kessler writes:

If you check Treasury Department calculations for what the richest Americans already pay in taxes, you would see that the top 1 percent pay in excess of 20 percent in income taxes and more than 30 percent in all federal taxes. Even if you drill down to the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers … they paid an effective tax rate of 23.1 percent in 2014.

So where did Biden’s phony “8%” number come from? His dreams. Or, rather, from the dreams of a couple of White House economists, Greg Leiserson and Danny Yagan, who published a “what if” blog post that estimated the tax rate “for the 400 wealthiest households if unrealized capital gains were considered part of income.”

But they’re not. So it isn’t. And therefore he’s lying. Facts, it seems, are stubborn things. And if you’ve lost Glenn Kessler, you’ve lost low-information America.

In this case, though, it’s hard to blame Joe. Were we in his shoes — decrepit, deceitful, and desperate — we’d probably be lying about the superrich, too. After all, they’re an easy target. And there are far fewer of them than there are of, say, families with incomes over $400,000. (Recall that it was this larger group that Biden double-crossed a couple of years ago when he rammed through his woefully misnamed Inflation Reduction Act and thereby raised the taxes of millions of Americans making less than $400,000 per year.)

If you don’t think elections have consequences, you haven’t been paying attention to the profound differences between the Democrats’ tax policy and that of the Republicans.

Will Republicans extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts? Will Democrats stick it to the rich and to the corporations, as Joe Biden has vowed to do? As The Wall Street Journal reports, the answers to these two questions alone will account for $6 trillion in taxes.

Make no mistake: Taxes will be on the ballot in November.