What Joe Biden’s tax policies mean for most Americans

With Joe Biden on the verge of clinching the presidency, Americans are wondering what a Biden administration will mean for their day-to-day lives – and for their bank accounts.

As is usual in Republican campaigns, Mr Trump and his party heavily invoked Mr Biden’s supposed high-tax policies in hopes of scaring voters away from him. Conversely, Mr Biden has long railed against a tax cut passed early in Mr Trump’s term that mostly benefited the very wealthy.

As the Biden website describes it, the measure “rewards wealth over work and favours multinational corporations over small businesses” and leaves middle-income households out – in fact amounting to a “hidden middle-class tax hike” that exacerbates the wealth gap between white and minority Americans.

So what are Mr Biden’s actual plans?

The former vice president has repeatedly insisted that under his administration, he will not impose any new tax burden on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. That applies to the vast majority of Americans; whether everyone under that threshold counts as less than “rich” has been the subject of much debate.

Along with this, Mr Biden is demanding short-term “emergency tax relief” as part of a coronavirus rescue package, which so far has failed to materialise. But in the long term, he has a fairly well-developed plan, much of it revolving around middle-class tax credits.

Expanded Child Tax Credit

In particular, he would expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for the duration of the coronavirus crisis (though the criteria for an end point is not clearly defined). As the campaign describes it, the measure “will increase the CTC to $3,000 per child for children ages 6 to 17 and $3,600 for children under 6. He will also make the CTC fully refundable so that hard-pressed families can access these resources quickly. And, he will allow families to receive monthly payments if they choose.”

Among its components are raising the corporate tax rate to 28 per cent, putting a “true minimum tax” on US companies located overseas while putting tax penalties on “corporations that ship jobs overseas in order to sell products back to America” and hiking the top rate of individual tax to 39.6 per cent.

Senate block?

Whether Mr Biden will be able to implement any of these plans will depend heavily on the makeup of Congress, specifically the Senate, which currently hangs in the balance. Two runoff elections in Georgia in January will decide which side holds the majority, and may leave the chamber at a 50-50 split, meaning Kamala Harris will have to be on hand to cast tie-breaking votes.

To his supporters, at least, the Biden tax message seems to have cut through. 

As the vice president closed in on an electoral college victory, a meme began spreading on Twitter in which users mocked everyday people’s worries about new taxes; “if your mattress is on the floor”, “if your microwave looks like” this, “if you use 3 in 1 soap”, they wrote, “do NOT worry about Biden’s tax plan”.