Biden, Promising Corporate Tax Increases, Has Cut Taxes Overall

President Biden has called for $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and high earners. But his record so far is as a net tax cutter.

Share full article

President Biden visited the Intel campus in Chandler, Ariz., on Wednesday. The president’s tax cuts include incentives to semiconductor factories as part of a bipartisan advanced manufacturing bill he signed in 2022.

President Biden, amping up a populist pitch in his re-election campaign, has repeatedly said he would raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to make them pay their “fair share.”

Republicans say Mr. Biden has “an unquenchable thirst for taxing the American people.” His Republican opponent in the election, former President Donald J. Trump, said recently that Mr. Biden was “going to give you the greatest, biggest, ugliest tax hike in the history of our country.”

So it might come as a surprise that, in just over three years in office, Mr. Biden has cut taxes overall.

The math is straightforward. An analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies fiscal issues, shows that the tax cuts Mr. Biden has signed for individuals and corporations are larger than the tax increases he has imposed on big corporations and their shareholders.

The analysis estimates that the tax changes Mr. Biden has ushered into law will amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years and slightly more than that over a full decade.

“It’s reasonable to conclude from those numbers that the Biden tax policy hasn’t been some kind of radical tax-raising program,” said Benjamin R. Page, a senior fellow at the center and author of the analysis.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.