Trump attacks Biden over plan to raise corporate tax rate

Former President Trump on Wednesday attacked President Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate to pay for a massive infrastructure proposal, claiming that doing so would send jobs to China and harm American workers.

“This legislation would be among the largest self-inflicted economic wounds in history. If this monstrosity is allowed to pass, the result will be more Americans out of work, more families shattered, more factories abandoned, more industries wrecked, and more Main Streets boarded up and closed down—just like it was before I took over the presidency 4 years ago,” Trump said in a statement.

“This tax hike is a classic globalist betrayal by Joe Biden and his friends: the lobbyists will win, the special interests will win, China will win, the Washington politicians and government bureaucrats will win—but hardworking American families will lose,” he added.

The White House laid out its $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan Wednesday to repair roads and bridges, invest in climate-friendly technologies, and expand broadband access, among other provisions. The plan calls for financing the spending over a 15-year period by hiking the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent.

Trump’s 2017 tax law, which was opposed by House and Senate Democrats, reduced the rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Trump’s statement misrepresented the state of the U.S. economy when he came into office, when the unemployment rate was at 4.7 percent. It was 6.3 percent when Trump left office, after millions of jobs were lost during the coronavirus pandemic.

The former president has periodically weighed in on Biden’s policy moves through statements or television interviews in recent weeks. He has been particularly critical of Biden’s handling of a surge of migrants at the southern border.

“Joe Biden’s cruel and heartless attack on the American Dream must never be allowed to become Federal law. Just like our southern border went from best to worst, and is now in shambles, our economy will be destroyed!” Trump said Wednesday.

Biden is slated to lay out his plan during a speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday afternoon. The White House says his proposal, which would need to be approved by Congress, will create millions of jobs.

Republicans have criticized Biden’s plan to raise taxes on corporations. Asked about such criticism Tuesday, a Biden administration official told reporters that Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 incentivized businesses to move their profits and production overseas.

“The principal impact of that tax bill, in addition to encouraging stock buybacks, was to actually make it easier and more attractive for companies to shift their profits and strip their profits out of the United States,” the official said.

“We have a more broken tax system that is providing greater incentive to evade the U.S. tax system and to locate production overseas. And so the opportunity is to reform the corporate tax system in a way that would maintain our competitiveness and actually encourage domestic production in the United States.”