US President Joe Biden’s budget for the fiscal year 2024 will be released on Thursday.
hile the document is always a bit of a wish list, and especially so given the current divided Congress, the Democratic president’s spending and revenue priorities will be key factors in upcoming negotiations with Republicans over raising the debt ceiling.
Cutting nearly $3trn (€2.9trn) from the national debt, Mr Biden will re-up a State of the Union pledge to trim the national debt of $31trn, over 10 years, with tax hikes on companies and high earners.
Boosting Medicare with taxes, Mr Biden hopes to raise the Medicare tax on income above $400,000 from 3.8pc to 5pc, and to expand the federal government’s ability to negotiate drug prices to keep the healthcare program solvent, the White House said this week.
Mr Biden plans to propose quadrupling the 1pc tax on stock buybacks that took effect in January, to encourage companies to invest in their growth instead of boosting shareholders.
The White House has said taxing buybacks creates a distortion in the tax system.
Dividends, they said, are taxable for many shareholders but share buybacks weren’t taxable until this year.
The plan to boost the buyback tax may struggle to move through Congress where Republicans control the House.
Mr Biden will revisit a provision of his 2021 Covid plan that expanded the child tax credit to lower-income families, and also he wants to reintroduce plans for federal funding for universal pre-kindergarten programmes.
The budget is expected to include millions in new funding for railroad safety measures after a series of high-profile accidents and derailments.
Mr Biden is expected to reiterate his call for a 20pc minimum tax on households worth more than $100m.
The White House refers to it as the “billionaire minimum income tax”.
The tax would make sure the wealthiest of Americans do not pay a tax rate lower than firefighters and teachers, Mr Biden said in his budget proposal last year.
Several past attempts by Democrats to push such a proposal have failed to move forward in Congress.