President Biden, bolstering a populist pitch in his re-election campaign, has repeatedly said he will raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to make them pay their “fair share.”
Republicans say Mr. Biden has “an unquenchable thirst to tax the American people.” His Republican opponent in the election, former President Donald J. Trump, recently said that Mr. Biden “is going to give you the biggest, biggest, ugliest tax increase in the history of our country.”
So it may come as a surprise that, in just three years in office, Mr. Biden has cut taxes across the board.
The math is clear. An analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies fiscal issues, shows that the tax cuts that Mr. Biden has signed into law for individuals and corporations are larger than the tax increases that Mr. has imposed. large companies and their shareholders.
The analysis estimates that the tax changes Mr. Biden introduced into law would amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years and slightly more than that over a full decade.
“It’s reasonable to conclude from these numbers that the Biden tax policy was not some kind of radical tax hike program,” said Benjamin R. Page, senior fellow at the center and author of the analysis.
The analysis takes a hard look at tax changes during Mr. Biden’s presidency, including some direct benefits to people and businesses that flow through the tax code. It does not measure the effects of inflation or certain regulations, which Republicans sometimes label “tax hikes” because they can increase costs for companies and individuals.
It also does not measure the social or economic benefits of Mr. Biden’s political spending or his regulatory efforts aimed at helping consumers, such as cracking down on so-called side effect charges and containing the cost of insulin and other drugs.
Instead, the analysis provides a comprehensive look at what Mr. Biden has done to the tax code and how those policies add up.
It’s clear by that measure that his record doesn’t live up to his own ambitions to tax the rich and big corporations — or Republican efforts to paint him as a tax-and-spend liberal.
That’s largely because Mr. Biden has struggled to pass his most ambitious tax-hike plans. “It’s what can be taken by Congress and signed,” Mr. Page said. “They were compromised.”
A White House spokesman, Michael Kikukawa, said in an email that Mr. Biden “is proud to have cut taxes for middle-class and working families while cracking down on wealthy tax dodgers and making big corporations pay more than they should.” their share”.
The tax cuts enacted by the president include incentives for companies to build and install solar panels, wind turbines and other technologies aimed at reducing fossil fuel emissions, which are central to the climate law he signed in 2022. This The law also contained tax cuts for people who buy certain low-emission technologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps.
Mr. Biden also gave tax breaks to semiconductor factories as part of a bipartisan advanced manufacturing bill he signed earlier that year.
The president also included temporary tax relief for individuals and some businesses in his 2021 stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan. The legislation expanded the tax credit for parents. It provided immediate checks of $1,400 for low- and middle-income Americans, which were technically tax credit advances.
Mr. Biden partially offset all of his tax cuts with two major new levies. Companies are now required to pay tax when they buy back their own stock. Another tax requires large corporations to pay at least 15 percent federal income tax, even if they qualify for deductions that would make them owe less.
The president has also pumped tens of billions of dollars into the Internal Revenue Service to help crack down on tax evaders and corporate tax evaders — an effort that will increase federal tax revenue but not raise tax rates.
But the president has struggled to get Congress — including a sizable number of Democrats in the two years his party has held the House and Senate — to sign off on a raft of other proposed tax increases.
Mr. Biden’s budget requests have been filled with ideas for taxing high incomes and corporations. These failed to gain traction on Capitol Hill. His most recent budget includes about $5 trillion in tax increases spread over a decade, including longtime Democratic plans such as raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent.
Republicans have attacked Mr. Biden over tax plans they say will cripple the economy. Representative Jodey C. Arrington, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Budget Committee, said at a hearing on Thursday that Mr. Biden believed in “more government and more spending and more taxation as the answers to the problems facing our country.”
Mr. Biden has emphasized his tax proposals in recent weeks, including during his State of the Union address. The president has repeatedly said he won’t raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, while calling on millionaires and billionaires to pay more.
He has also boasted about his tax record, as he did this week in Las Vegas. “In 2020, 55 of the largest Fortune 500 companies made $40 billion in revenue,” Mr. Biden said. “They paid zero in federal taxes. Not anymore.”
Mr. Biden was referring to the minimum corporate tax created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that also included climate-related tax incentives. The Treasury has struggled to implement this tax, which companies first faced last year.
The ministry does not yet have figures on how many companies will pay the tax for 2023, officials said this week.
