Joe Biden pledged to eliminate all of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts when campaigning in Iowa over the weekend.
Biden, who has made no effort to hide his ambition to raise taxes if elected in 2020, told a crowd in the Hawkeye State that by eliminating the tax cuts Trump passed during his first year in office, the country could spend more on healthcare and other items. The former vice president, however, did not just promise to roll back some of the cuts for the wealthy, like his other 2020 competitors, but he pledged to “eliminate” all of them.
“By eliminating just a few of the tax cuts, I’m going to eliminate mostly – all of them,” Biden said. “But a few of the tax cuts, we – you think I’m joking, but I’m not.”
“If you know anything about me and taxes,” he added.
The stance might not be all that popular for Biden, especially as he pitches himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back working class and middle class voters. As the conservative-leaning Americans for Tax reform has noted, a single parent taking care of one child on an annual income of $41,000 received a tax cut of more than $1,300 because of Trump’s tax package.
Similar results have been seen in states that Biden claims he can win in 2020. In Pennsylvania, which voted Republican for the first time since 1988 last election, households making the average state income received a tax cut of more than $1,400, according to the Tax Foundation. Households in Wisconsin and Michigan, which also hadn’t voted Republican for decades until Trump, received tax cuts in the same range.
Since announcing his presidential campaign, Biden has repeatedly attempted to paint Trump’s tax cuts as only benefiting the super wealthy.
“Look, Donald Trump has put in a horrible situation, we do have enormous income inequality,” Biden said at the first Democrat presidential debate in June. “The one thing I agree on is we can make massive cuts in the $1.6 trillion dollars in tax loopholes out there, and I would be going about eliminating Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.”
The claim, though, was largely debunked, even by liberal outlets like The Washington Post, which found the average family making between $50,000 and $75,000 annually got a tax cut of around $1,000.