With social promises and increases in taxes for the rich, the proposed budget presented this Thursday by Joe Biden has the 2024 elections in its sights, but its most forceful measures have little chance of approval in the Congress.
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“My budget reflects what we can do to ease the burden on American workers,” he said. Biden in a speech to union leaders in Philadelphia, Pennsylvaniaa strategic state for the 2024 elections for re-election.
The 80-year-old Democrat seems to want to appeal to movement voters.”Make America Great Again” (MAGA) of his predecessor, the Republican Donald Trump. Biden tries to convince the middle class that the most beneficial measures are Democratic authorship.
The 2024 budget plan calls for reducing the projected fiscal deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next 10 years.
But his most striking measures have almost no chance of passing, since the Democratic Party only controls the upper house of the Congress, he Senate. The House of Representatives it is in the hands of Republicans, who are vehemently opposed to raising taxes.
An unintentional budget
The president of the United States wants to introduce a minimum tax of 25% for billionaires, that is, 0.01% of the richest. With additional income, Biden estimates it might secure funding for another 25 years of Medicare, public health insurance that benefits Americans age 65 and older.
“My budget will ask the wealthy to pay their fair share so the millions of hard workers who helped build that wealth can retire on the Medicare they paid for,” Biden tweeted.
The Democratic president also wants to increase the tax burden on companies, from 21% to 28% of their income, still well below the 35% that prevailed before the former president’s reform Trump in 2017.
The Republican President of the Lower House, Kevin McCarthycalled the plan a “reckless proposal” and compared it to “far-left spending policies that have led to record inflation” and “the current debt crisis.”
In his opinion, it is necessary to “reduce unnecessary public spending.”
Biden proposes to reduce some spending, especially in the pharmaceutical sector and the oil industry. And, to seduce the Republican electorate, he said that his budget provides for large investments in defense and the military.
One of the sections of the budget is focused on migration, especially on the border with Mexico, an issue that causes headaches for the government a few weeks following the suspension of a law that allows preventing the entry of almost all migrants intercepted in the border for health reasons.
To “improve border security and law enforcement,” nearly $25 billion would go toward Customs and Border Protectiona (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increase of almost 800 million since 2023.
The amount includes, among other things, funds to hire an additional 350 border patrol agents, $535 million for port-of-entry security technology, and $40 million to combat trafficking in fentanyl, an opioid produced primarily in Mexico by drug cartels wreaking havoc in the US.
Given the growing number of migrants intercepted at the border with Mexico (more than two million in 2022), the budget proposes a new fund of 4.7 billion to help the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to “respond to migration surges.”
To address the so-called “root causes of migration and improve the lives of people in Central America,” Biden is asking for more than $1 billion as part of his commitment to provide $4 billion over four years for that purpose.
Biden also requests 430 million to manage migration, 40 million to “support targeted programs to improve the lives of migrants and refugees” in Latin America and the Caribbean and 75 million for the Inter-American Development Bank (BID).
The government also provides $865 million to process asylum cases and plans to invest $291 million in Haiti, a country mired in a deep humanitarian crisis.
And the debt ceiling?
There is another pressing financial issue for both Democrats and Republicans: the so-called “increasing the debt ceiling.”
The United States must periodically increase, through a vote in Congress, the government’s borrowing capacity.
Kevin McCarthy guarantees that his ranks will not vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling until Joe Biden curbs public spending.
The stakes are high: if the confrontation drags on too long, the United States would be at risk of default.
The debt of the largest economy in the world reached 31.4 trillion dollars on January 19, a ceiling above which the country can no longer issue bonds to finance itself and, therefore, can no longer honor its payments. For now, the government has taken temporary measures to keep paying.
LEG
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