I’m getting a little tired of presidents of the United States repeating things that could only be spoken by an idiot or a liar, and then trying to intimidate people out of contradicting them.
The latest (though of course not the most egregious) offender is one Joseph R. Biden, who told the country today that he can raise corporate income taxes without imposing any additional tax burden on anyone who earns less than $400,000 a year. Because in the United States of America, nobody with an income under $400,000 owns any stocks or mutual funds. And if you disagree, he’ll stare you in the face and repeat himself.
Joe Manchin has also taken up the banner on this. I don’t know enough about Manchin to say whether he’s economically illiterate or a liar or both. (I don’t think Biden is an idiot, though he’s obviously cognitively dysfunctional.) But Manchin’s practice of yelling “That’s an outright lie!” at anyone who says that raising corporate income taxes is a tax on (some) people earning less than $400,000 a year tells me that either he realizes now that he was duped into supporting the tax increase, or he knew it all along and just planned to lie about it.
A couple of clarifying examples:
- My wife owns a small business. If corporate taxes go up, you could say that’s a tax on the business, but as the owner, she files the taxes and pays them, so it’s really a tax on her.
- Public companies have lots of owners. I own some stocks and mutual funds, and I also make less than $400k a year. I have a partial ownership interest in the companies of which I own shares. I offload the details of running the companies and filing the taxes to the boards of directors. However, when my fellow shareholders and I look at the annual reports and financial statements from those boards, we are looking at assets that we own and taxes that we pay.