President Joe Biden criticized the House Republicans’ tax agenda Monday, pointing to the new majority’s push to repeal new funding for the Internal Revenue Service, abolish the federal tax agency and replace the income tax with a tax federal on consumption.
Speaking at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington, DC, Biden called Republicans «tax nuts» and vowed to veto their tax legislation, which will almost certainly fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“Raising taxes on working families worsens inflation,” he said. «Let me be clear, if any of these bills make it to my desk, I will veto them.»
The first bill, sponsored by Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Nebraska, would rescind more than $70 million in new IRS spending passed last year as part of Biden’s Cut Inflation Act, including money to hire 87,000 new agents, a frequent target of Republicans. criticism. That legislation passed the House on a party-line vote of 221-210.
Biden said he was «disappointed» that Smith’s legislation was the first bill the new Republican majority voted for, saying it would «help rich people and big corporations cheat on their taxes at the expense of ordinary middle-class taxpayers.
“All these new IRS agents that we have is because a lot of them got laid off, a lot of them are retiring and guess what? Who needs serious agents to know what they are doing or not doing? The billionaires, the billionaires,” he said, noting that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected the bill would add $114 billion to the deficit. “This is your first bill. They campaigned on inflation. They did not say if they were elected, their plan was to make inflation worse.
The other tax bill in Biden’s sights was introduced last week by Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ge., and would abolish the IRS, eliminate income taxes and institute a federal excise tax. The bill is also likely to fail in the Senate.
What in God’s name is this all about other than the obvious? Biden said. “They want working class people to pay another 10, 20% of their taxes depending on where they live and how they spend their money. And they’re going to cut taxes for the super-rich.»