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Biden calls on rich to ‘step up and pay’ ‘fair share’ in taxes after ironic report he may have fudged his own

September 25, 2021 | | Print Article
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In typical liberal fashion, Democrat President Joe Biden is now demanding that others do what he himself reportedly refuses to do.

During the same White House speech Friday in which he threw his own Border Patrol Agents under the bus over the fake “whip” narrative, the president also attacked the wealthy, accusing them of not paying their “fair share” and arguing this is “just wrong.”

“Look, I really mean this, and if you look at my whole career — and I come from the corporate state of America — I just think it’s about just paying your fair share, for Lord’s sake,” he sanctimoniously lectured.

“Now, we can argue whether or not the corporate tax should go back up to 26.5 percent or 28 or 24. But the idea that 50 major corporations in America making a sum total of $40 billion pays zero [in taxes]. Come on! come on! It’s just wrong, It’s just not fair,” he added.

Listen:

(Video: CNN)

The remarks came on the same day that a report broke revealing that in 2017 and 2018, the president and his wife used a widely known tax loophole to avoid paying up to $500,000 of their own so-called “fair share” of taxes.

During those two years, the couple specifically rerouted $13 million in “book and speech” income through two “pass-through” S corporations they own, CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp.

After rerouting the money, they then “paid themselves” only $800,000, meaning the rest of the income was treated as corporate earnings versus personal earnings.

The benefit of corporate earnings is that they aren’t subject to FICA taxes, meaning big, big, big savings for those who use this loophole.

In the Bidens’ case, their savings came out to $500,000.

This bombshell finding outraged congressional Republicans.

“Joe Biden wants to raise taxes by $2.1 trillion while claiming the rich need to pay their ‘fair share.’ But in 2017, multi-millionaire Joe Biden skirted his payroll taxes — the very taxes that fund Medicare and Obamacare,” Republican Study Committee chair Rep. Jim Banks said in a statement.

“According to the criteria CRS provided to my office, he owes the IRS and the American people hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Every American should know about Joe Biden’s tax hypocrisy,” he added.

And indeed, those Americans who were paying attention were quick on Friday to ask the president why he wasn’t paying his own so-called “fair share” of taxes.

Look:

The president’s complaints about corporations not paying their “fair share” indicated a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market operates.

First, corporations do pay taxes — lots of it — but mainly on the local level. Take Amazon. It paid $1 billon in local, state and international taxes in 2017 and $1.18 in 2018, according to Forbes.

Second, corporations never pay taxes out of pocket. Instead they “pay” them by passing them onto consumers, employees and investors.

Third, the reason corporations like Amazon benefit from so many federal tax breaks is so that they can reinvest their profits and thus “stimulate economic activity, job creation and innovation,” according to Forbes.

There’s a reason the pre-COVID economy boomed under former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but the economy is now headed south despite the COVID pandemic slowly but surely fading away.

Biden made his controversial “fair share” remarks Friday while speaking in favor of a radical proposal by congressional Democrats to tax the “unrealized capital gains” of billionaires.

If you buy a stock and the price rises but you don’t immediately sell your holdings, the increase in your stock’s value is considered an unrealized capital gain.

For instance, if you buy 200 shares of stock A for $1, or $200 total, and the price per share of stock A rises to $2, or $400 total, you’d have $200 in unrealized capital gain.

Democrats’ proposal would force billionaires to pay a tax on their own unrealized capital gains, which is problematic because unrealized capital gains can easily be reversed.

Suppose you’re taxed on the $200 in capital gains, but then the price of stock A suddenly drops from $2 back to $1. You’d be left with $200 total in stocks, in addition to a tax bill for an additional $200 “unrealized capital gain” that doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s because of this that the proposal is considered so radical that it’s laughable.

Yet to this administration, it all somehow makes sense …

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Vivek Saxena
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