Biden says his tax plan will create 18.6 million jobs


Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Thursday night he will be able to keep his pledge of not raising taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year while still repealing President Trump's tax cuts.
A Republican voter asked Biden about this during an ABC News town hall in Philadelphia, and the former vice president said $1.3 trillion of the $2 trillion in Trump's tax cuts went to the country's wealthiest — "the top 1/10th of 1 percent. That's what I'm talking about eliminating, not all the tax cuts that are out there."
Biden said that if the corporate tax rate is raised back to 28 percent, "which is a fair tax, you'd raise $1,300,000,000 by that one act. If you made sure people making over $400,000 paid what they did in the Bush administration, 39.6 percent, you'd raise another ... $92 billion."
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Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the economy could handle these tax increases as it tries to recover from the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Biden responded that Moody's conducted an analysis of his tax plan and found it would create 18.6 million jobs and raise the GDP by a trillion dollars, and he would invest "a great deal" into "infrastructure and green infrastructure."
Biden also got in a jab at Trump, saying that he "talks about a V-shaped recovery. It's a K-shaped recovery. If you're on the top, you're going to do very well. ... If you're at the bottom, or you're in the middle or the bottom, your income is coming down. You're not getting a raise."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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