Biden throws down 2024 gauntlet with populist budget

• Published date: 10 March 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

President Joe Biden presented Thursday what amounts to his 2024 reelection pitch on the U.S. economy, with a proposed budget targeting the rich with new taxes, while promising to assist the country's "working families."

The details released by the White House ? due to be laid out in person by Biden in a speech later in Philadelphia ? throw down the gauntlet to Republicans as the president builds to an expected reelection campaign announcement.

Republicans in Congress will certainly block most of Biden's proposals, arguing that spending cuts, not tax raises, are the solution to resolving the country's ballooning debt.

However, they are now under pressure to explain where they would reduce spending. Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to seize the populist high ground by framing themselves as the party of ordinary Americans.

Biden's plan will "invest in America, lower costs and cut taxes for working families," the White House said. "President Biden has long believed that we need to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out, not the top down."

Main points in Biden's budget proposal include a pledge to slash the federal deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade.

Among measures achieving that would be a minimum 25 percent tax on the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans. And the corporate tax would rise from less than 10 percent to 28 percent, reversing a huge tax cut enacted under president Donald Trump in 2017, the White House said.

Biden is also proposing to raise taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year to ensure that Medicare ? the government-funded health insurance system for people over 65 ? remains solvent.

Hiking the Medicare tax from 3.8 to 5.0 percent for those wealthy individuals would ensure the program's viability for more than two decades, the White House says.

"My budget will ask that the rich pay their fair share so the millions of workers who helped build that wealth can retire with the Medicare they paid into," Biden tweeted Thursday.

Populist

Most of Biden's proposed budget is basically a wish list.

It's the "start of a healthy dialogue," according to Shalanda...