As he formally rolls out his proposed budget at an event Thursday in Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden looks set to call for increasing certain taxes and taking steps to bolster Medicare, along with other measures. Many of his proposals aren’t expected to find much traction in the Republican-run House of Representatives, but they could help provide the Democratic incumbent with talking points in a 2024 re-election campaign. Biden appears poised to announce in the coming weeks that he’ll run for president again.
The White House already has released some parts of his proposed budget, including a call for raising the Medicare tax rate for people making more than $400,000 a year. Other tax hikes that Biden could talk up include a billionaire minimum tax, a quadrupling of the levy on stock buybacks and higher taxes on corporations — all measures that he’s previously argued for. Biden said during a speech last week in Virginia Beach, Va., that he’s “going to raise some taxes” as he introduces his proposed budget, and he mentioned that billionaires would be targeted. He referred to the very wealthy again Monday while speaking at an International Association of Fire Fighters conference in Washington, D.C. “No billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a firefighter,” Biden said. The GOP-controlled House is likely to kill Biden’s proposed tax hikes, and Democrats are “nervous that they are on the wrong side of the crime debate and now will be left to defend Biden’s tax hikes,” said Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, in a note on Monday. So Democrats “will push hard …