Biden pledges to not raise taxes on those making under $400,000

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday said that he would not increase taxes on those making less than $400,000 annually.

“Nobody making under 400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised. Period. Bingo,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with CNBC.

Biden has floated a number of tax proposals during his campaign, largely targeted at raising taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses.

These include rolling back President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for people with income over $400,000, capping the value of itemized deductions for people in tax brackets above 28 percent, taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income for those making more than $1 million, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and imposing a 15 percent minimum tax on companies’ income as reported on financial statements.

An analysis of Biden’s tax plan released in March by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, which is led by a former Obama administration official, found that those with incomes of above $837,400 would see the biggest tax increases, but that all income groups on average would see their taxes go up.

The think tank found that those with incomes under $352,800 would on average see tax increases of less than 1 percent of their after-tax income, and that tax increases on those people would primarily be due to indirect effects of raising corporate taxes. An economic adviser to Biden said when the Tax Policy Center’s analysis came out that the experience with Trump’s tax law, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, raises questions about the notion that a portion of the corporate tax is ultimately paid by workers.

Biden isn’t the first presidential candidate to pledge not to raise taxes on people who make under a certain amount. For example, former President Obama said during his 2008 campaign that he wouldn’t raise taxes on people who make under $250,000. But this type of pledge could make it more difficult to raise some of the revenue needed to pay for a number of Democratic policy objectives.