OPINION:
Team Biden has been having fun for the last few weeks by falsely claiming that Republicans want to raise your taxes. This misdirection is an effort to short circuit a laudatory idea — proposed by Sen. Rick Scott — that everyone should have some stake, some interest in the national government.
It is also, of course, a sad and failing attempt by President Biden to change the topic from his epic economic failures.
Team Biden took the original idea and built an ever-expanding and increasingly less plausible charade that everyone would see tax increases in the event that the Republicans control the House and preside over the Senate next January.
There is, of course, only one problem with that. The Republicans in general, and Mr. Scott specifically, have no intention of raising taxes.
In comparison, however, the Democrats, especially in the Senate, have spent much of the last year energetically trying to figure out ways to raise your taxes. The reconciliation discussion, up to and including today, has been entirely about whether the Democrats want to raise your taxes by $4.5 trillion (the progressives’ preferred number) or “only” $500 billion (the moderates’ preferred number).
Even Sen. Joe Manchin seems to be busy dreaming of a world in which taxes are increased on companies and individuals.
Those who want to raise taxes — including Mr. Biden — want to distract with questions about where or on whom new taxes will be imposed. But we all know that no matter who starts out paying, or how tax writers make it look, consumers (us) and taxpayers (again, us) wind up paying for all of it either directly or indirectly.
All of us also pay for the reduced economic growth caused by new and increased taxes. That seems especially important to keep in mind as we head into our next recession.
More egregiously — and just to make it clear who wants to damage who — a few days ago four Democratic senators (led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse) proposed an energy tax that would raise taxes on gasoline (about 50 cents per gallon), natural gas and electricity. This proposal, which comes at a moment of historically high energy prices, is the most damaging legislative idea possible.
Such an energy tax would be intensely regressively, hurting the poor, the elderly, those on fixed incomes and local institutions like schools and hospitals, which are on fixed budgets.
Mr. Whitehouse and his crew don’t care about any of that. They want to increase energy costs because of climate change.
At almost the same moment, Mr. Scott took the time to clarify his proposal. He says simply: “Able-bodied Americans under 60, who do not have young children or incapacitated dependents, should work. … Government must never again incentivize people to not work by paying them more to stay home.”
Such an approach seems salutary for the republic and confirms (yet again) that Mr. Scott is a serious man and will if he chooses to run, be a formidable competitor for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
So, the next time Team Biden talks about who wants to raise your taxes, Republicans should remind everyone that only the Democrats have written and introduced legislative proposals to raise your taxes, and only the Democrats (even those mythical moderates) have been working for the last 18 months on legislation to take trillions of dollars from the citizenry.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.
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