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August 18, 2022

So Biden lied about tax hikes on the little guy...

By Monica Showalter

Joe Biden is still out assuring the skeptical public that his $739-billion spending bill on IRS tax auditors and Green New Deal boondoggles won't cost middle-class taxpayers a thing. 

Yesterday, he signed off on his badly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" and made sure he added these statements:

After all, he gave his "word as a Biden," on that, insisting he's "never broken his word."

But sure enough, there were not just 87,000 IRS auditors in that bill to target small businesses and collect more.  There also were bona fide tax hikes in the monstrosity he just signed off on.

Here's the latest from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as reported by the New York Post:

The Inflation Reduction Act sent to President Biden's desk will end up forcing working-class Americans to pay billions of dollars in new taxes, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

An analysis by the CBO estimates those earning less than $400,000 — the group on which Biden promised not to raise taxes — will pay an estimated $20 billion more in taxes over the next decade as a result of the Democrat-pushed $740 billion package, which also sets aside $80 billion to hire 87,000 IRS agents.

The CBO wasn't the only one pointing to the tax hikes on the little guy — and it's a very little guy indeed who's going to pay through the nose on those taxes, people making as little as $30,000 a year.

According to Akash Chougule, writing in RealClearPolitics:

Congress' nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation says it will raise taxes on every income bracket above $30,000 per year. President Biden has repeatedly pledged he would not raise taxes on any family making less than $400,000, but the committee found that the middle class and low earners will face the steepest tax hikes under the proposal. 

This is nasty stuff, given that middle-class and poor people already are paying a $5,520 annual premium for Bidenflation.  Inflation is a hidden tax, of course, on the poor, but Biden is combining that with some nakedly obvious tax hikes on the poor, too, plus an army of IRS auditors.  We all know whom they audit the most.  See the chart here.

Up until now, many Democrats, including Joe Manchin and other hypocrites who voted for the bill, as well as President Obama, had said in the past that tax hikes during inflation, or a recession, is the one thing you don't do.  Well, they did.

And that raises questions as to what cynical game might be going on here as the middle class gets it from all directions from Biden.  They all know that raising taxes during a recession is a no-no, yet they did it anyway, and Biden's claims otherwise have been exposed as lies.

The tax hike, by the way, comes as revenues brought in by the IRS have been at record highs.  According to The Balance, a website about federal spending, COVID hasn't damped what the Feds have been drawing in from taxes.

In 2021, U.S. tax revenue was an estimated $3.86 trillion, up from 2020's estimated $3.71 trillion, and significantly higher than 2019's actual $3.46 trillion.

It's not as if the federal government is lacking for incoming money.

So the tax hikes are strange stuff, not just because it's a recession, and you don't hike taxes during a recession, but because it's so closely linked with the Bidenflation that is plaguing the country.

Two cynical scenarios could be at work here.

One, perhaps they know they can't print money forever but remain determined to spend like Hugo Chávez.

So instead of relying on interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve to break inflation, which is what most people are looking for, and which they know the Fed is reluctant to do, fearing that they will trigger a recession, their plan is to hike taxes on the little guy to take cash out of the system and thus damp inflation.  The responsible way to kill off inflation is to cut back on federal spending and all the money-printing it requires, but they can't bring themselves to do that.  So instead of cutting back, they make the little guy pay more. 

Conversely, as inflation goes up with federal money-printing in the "spend" part of the bill, the cynical plan is to inflate away their own federally accumulated debt, meaning they won't have to pay back what they borrowed for the value of what they borrowed.  That certainly would make inflation a fine thing for them as big spenders, so they have no intention of stopping inflation with any cutting back.  They effectively could pay back the cost of the gold they borrowed in toilet paper money and keep the cash flowing for themselves through higher taxes.  It would be great stuff for them, but it would end much spending at all for the little guy, who'd be converting his earnings to higher taxes plus losing the rest to inflation.

Bottom line here is that they do have some kind of plan here to keep inflation high and raise taxes, too, because despite what they know about raising taxes during an inflationary recession, they went and raised them anyway.

It sounds like big, big, big plans for expanding the federal government — until there are no taxpayers left with money to pay.  And all they need to do to get away with it is lie about it.

Let's see if that makes it past 2022.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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