Biden Is Smart to Attack Rick Scott’s Tax Hike on the Poor. But He Needs to Hit It Harder.

Perhaps you wonder how we got from 46 percent not paying taxes in 2012 to more than half not paying taxes today. In a word, Covid. Before the pandemic, the non-taxpaying cohort had actually shrunk a little, to the low to mid-40s. During the pandemic, the cohort grew because people lost their jobs, because the stimulus checks weren’t taxable, and because the government extended various emergency tax credits (not just the EITC). Scott’s a bit of a hypocrite on this point because he voted for the 2020 Cares Act, which sent out many of those stimulus checks. But Scott voted against the follow-up stimulus bills in December 2020 and March 2021.

Scott’s embrace of Romney’s losing strategy is, for Biden, a softball pitched right over the plate. It allows Biden to depict Republicans as moral monsters. It allows him to demonstrate he’s the true friend of the working poor and the working class, and to sidestep any defense of the nonworking poor that might rub moderate voters the wrong way. (The nonworking poor are irrelevant to this conversation because they have no income on which to pay taxes.) In the Tax Day fact sheet, Biden said the Rescue America plan would “increase middle-class families’ taxes an average of nearly $1,500.” That’s a point Biden should have hit harder, because when you consult Biden’s source (a Tax Policy Center study), it’s apparent that he’s talking about the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. That isn’t middle class in most cases; it’s poor. The NRSC plan would increase taxes by $1,020, on average, for the bottom 20 percent. That’s people who make less than about $30,000. The plan would increase taxes by $2,250 for the 20 percent above them. That’s people who make more than about $30,000 but less than about $55,000. Imagine squeezing people making this kind of money. It’s repugnant.

In this week’s speech, Biden again soft-pedaled the petty cruelty of the Rescue America plan by saying it would “raise taxes on 75 million American families, over 95 percent of whom make less than $100,000 a year.” Obviously, Biden was trying to convey that the NRSC wants to raise taxes on you, Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class, but that isn’t the outrage. The outrage is that the NRSC wants to raise taxes on people who may not be tuning in—people whose fondest dream is to earn enough to join the middle class. And it was a mistake for Biden to signal that 5 percent of the people who’d pay more taxes under the Rescue America tax-the-poor plan have incomes above $100,000 a year. If you make that much and you don’t pay taxes, I would certainly like to know why not.