Biden’s Class Warfare Pitch Is Full of False Charges

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Just a few hours before President Biden gave his class warfare pitch to level the playing field, as he calls it, and punish success, though he denies it, and falsely charge that wealthy people and large companies don’t pay any taxes, all of which is far-left, progressive, woke, Democratic claptrap, with not an ounce of truth in any of it —

Just a few hours before we had to sit through all of this, the Commerce Department retail sales release was a blowout. Instead of down big from Wall Street, the number was up big.

Even when one takes out the glitch for lower car sales, the number was even bigger than anyone dreamed of, and the core retail sales number that feeds into GDP came up even bigger than all of that.

In recent days we had a big release for industrial production, manufacturing and business equipment spending. Regional Federal Reserve surveys of manufacturing are strong.

The Institute for Supply Management numbers are strong. The 11 million unfilled jobs demand for workers is strong off the chart. Broad inflation measures may be simmering but still running at a too high 4%.

Now with all that, President Biden with a straight face tells the nation this afternoon we need a $6 trillion federal spending package. Really? Do you think anybody in their right mind believes that? Is there any common sense to this story at all?

Playing the class warfare card is not going to work. Polls show clearly that the nation favors free enterprise capitalism — not big government socialism. Who thinks there’s a groundswell for picking out small businesses and punishing them with the worst tax increases in the ways and means package?

Do you think that persons who work want the United States to have the highest corporate tax among developed countries? We would be Number 1, except for Columbia and Portugal. Communist China — a state-run economy — would be substantially lower.

Is that what we want — a capital gains tax that would be higher than 40% effectively, again, much higher than China? Is that what Americans want? Or how about this? We’ve had record profits in recent years and record corporate tax payments on those record profits following the Trump tax cuts of 2017.

Mr. Biden telling folks today that big companies don’t pay taxes is utter nonsense. People know it’s not true. The government statistics show that it’s not true. Now here’s a key point on profits: Mr. Biden and the Left might hate profits, but profits are the mother’s milk of stocks and the lifeblood of the economy.

If businesses large and small aren’t making money, then they can’t expand. They’ll have to lay off employees and contractors and surely cut wages. Our pal Dan Clifton estimates that the Ways and Means bill could cut S&P 500 profits by $100 billion — nearly half of the expected profit gain next year.

That means no wage increases for the blue collar and middle class workforce. That means no investment in new business equipment and technology to make the workforce more productive.

That means going back to the stagnation days for family income that was the hallmark of the Obama-Biden period before President Trump’s tax cuts. That’s right, tax companies, and you will go into wage stagnation. You will slow the entire economy down.

The Biden plan will throw a wet blanket over a healthy pandemic recovery. So if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Smart policy would make the Trump tax cuts permanent because they work so well in generating record low unemployment — including for women and minorities — and record high real wages. And record declines in poverty and income inequality.

Mr. Biden wants to level the playing field. That suggests to me that he wants to make all of us poorer, not more prosperous. I don’t like leveling. I like raising. I like opportunity. I like rewarding success. These are all reasons why I firmly believe we must save America by killing the bill.

Finally, all these good, left-wing intentions to increase subsidies for childcare, dependent care, nutrition, the child tax credit, free community college, more Obamacare, more Medicaid, more more more — none of these mores have a single workfare requirement. None.

This is government welfare dependency on a grand scale. This cuts to the heart of America’s social fabric, which the Democrats want to transform into big government socialism. In some sectors, like healthcare and energy, they literally want to take over the means of production. More insanity. So, again, save the country. Kill the bill.

________

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox News.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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