Biden proposes social spending budgets for 2025 covered by tax increases on the rich | USA Elections

Increased taxes on companies and higher incomes, more spending on social programs and a wide range of measures to benefit the middle class. President Joe Biden’s Budget for fiscal year 2025, which begins in October, sounds like familiar music, but also an electoral claim, clearly marking the differences that separate the Democrat from the Republicans. This Monday, Biden sent his proposal, worth 7.3 trillion dollars – considerably more than the 5.8 trillion in 2023 – to Congress, although it is expected that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, still slim, will return to stop it, as he did with the Budgets of the previous year.

Biden recovers not only the tone of the start of his mandate, in 2021, with his great investment program, his commitment to production in the United States and his fight once morest climate change, but also the momentum that defined his State of the Union speech last Thursday: a relief for Democrats, who feared the image of the forgetful old man projected by the polls and who, on the contrary, found an energetic leader willing to fight.

The White House proposal only includes relatively small changes from the budget plan presented last year that went nowhere due to Republican opposition in Congress. The text reiterates its request that lawmakers approve some $100 billion to strengthen border security and help Israel and Ukraine. Again, most of the measures planned for 2025 have virtually no chance of becoming law this year, as Republicans adamantly oppose their tax agenda. Last week, House Republicans approved a budget proposal whose priorities are far from what Democrats are requesting.

After two years of inflation at maximum levels, and despite the good direction of the economy, voters continue to consider that the situation of their finances is not good. The middle class is today the backbone of its economic and social program, as it was in its electoral promises in 2020, hence the abundant nods to the lower and lower middle classes. “Too many working families find it too difficult to find a good home, so we are working to reduce costs and increase the supply of housing across the country,” Biden says. The Budget, she adds, “restores the expanded child tax credit I signed into law, which cut child poverty almost in half in 2021; and guarantees the vast majority of families high-quality child care for no more than $10 a day, while increasing the pay of child care workers. It offers universal free preschool for the four million four-year-old American children,” a measure that clashes, for example, with the withdrawal of subsidies to that school section in Democratic cities like New York.

Under the new Budget proposal, parents would get more child tax relief, reducing taxes by an average of $2,600 for 39 million low- and middle-income families. The Democratic Administration also intends to strengthen the income tax credit for low-wage workers who are not raising a child at home, reducing taxes by an average of $800 a year for 19 million individuals or couples. workers. The social deduction for children and their care are not accessory issues, as they are at the root of phenomena as dramatic as child poverty, which offers figures as alarming as the reality of 25% of children in New York in a situation of destitution. .

The latest budgets of Biden’s first term, written to win the elections, also contemplate enshrining some protections of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, which expire next year, something he already outlined in Thursday’s speech. Another of the issues that he addressed in that message was the cap on the cost of medications, and accordingly, he once once more asks Congress to limit the cost of medications to $2,000 and $35 for insulin —some capital importance to the millions of diabetics in the United States—applies to everyone, and not just Medicare beneficiaries, public health coverage for those over 65 years of age. The draft also includes a wide range of measures to combat the high costs of housing and university tuition, following its commitment to forgive or at least reduce the university debt that keeps many graduates tied up for decades. Almost all the points that now appear black on white in the Budget proposal were cited in his speech on Thursday.

Where Biden is going to have the most difficulty in carrying out the maximum program that all budgets are, is in the corporate tax and the highest income tax, with an expected collection of five trillion dollars over a decade thanks to those new rates. Democratic administration officials explained this Monday that this goal would be divided equally between companies and the highest incomes in the country, and that Americans earning less than $400,000 a year would enjoy tax cuts totaling $750 billion. Dollars.

Few of the proposals in the 2025 Budget are new. The program Made in America of the 2020 electoral campaign, gave way in his government agenda to Invest in America, but the objectives were, and are today, the same: promote job creation, strengthen supply chains and national security to overcome strategic dependence on China, boost American leadership in manufacturing and innovation — a nod to its commitment to the national manufacturing of microchips or electric cars—and to confront the climate crisis, the objective of its ambitious Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Before the midterm elections in November 2022, Biden managed to carry out, with relative difficulties, his great investment plans, but since the Republicans took control of the House, his efforts have become even more shameless

Biden’s triple wink as he faces the end of his first term is there, in the cumbersome pages of some Budgets: at the same time legacy, electoral program and government roadmap if he manages to beat Donald Trump at the polls in November. If every year the presentation of the document grabs headlines, this year he does it in block letters.

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