OPINION:
As a candidate for president, Joe Biden promised to “build back better” the America we knew before the pandemic lockdowns sent the economy into a tailspin. Now that he’s in office, he seems more interested in bringing back “big government.”
He’s proposed programs to tax, spend and regulate the economy, small business, our educational institutions, the health care system and other important parts of life here in America that the economists in the hip pocket of the progressive movement applaud. To them, massive government spending is stimulus. To the rest of us, it’s toxic.
It’s time to admit government caused the current crisis. Governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom — whom California voters will soon have a chance to recall — shut down economic activity in their states based on specious science suggesting lockdowns would stop the pandemic from spreading. We now know, by comparing the data from those states with Florida and Georgia and South Dakota, which never closed or reopened early, that the scientists were wrong.
The economists now advising Mr. Biden are wrong too. They say America can get back on track through trillions in new spending underwritten by trillions in new taxes. Their plan foolishly takes money away from job creators, gives it to the jobless, and will plunge the nation into what at best is a flat recovery.
The Biden plan Democrats are falling all over themselves to back takes the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% which, while still lower than it was before the Republicans enacted the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, would still be higher by 7 points than Communist China’s. That’s not the way to “build back better.” Even worse, what the president and his advisers want to do is create good jobs overseas instead of here at home.
Specifically, his proposal to increase the tax on Global Intangible Low Tax Income (GILTI) to 21%, calculated on a country-by-country basis while eliminating the 10% exemption on tangible investment abroad will be, some analysts predict, a job creator all right — just not here in the United States.
This specific piece of Mr. Biden’s overall plan would stimulate the expansion of the labor force overseas while doing nothing for workers here at home. It penalizes American companies by imposing a major new minimum tax that foreign competitors don’t have to pay, leaving them with excess capital to fuel an economic expansion and create jobs in other countries.
What Mr. Biden wants is a threat to U.S. global competitiveness. Even the left-leaning Tax Policy Center says what the president is aiming for would put U.S. firms at a clear disadvantage relative to foreign multinationals. Nobody who voted for him wanted to build back the 1970s, yet that’s just what he’s trying to do. Bad idea.
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