Trump said Biden wants “to quadruple your taxes” | Fact check

In his first interview since he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, former President Donald Trump deflected the focus to his presumptive opponent this fall, President Joe Biden.

During the June 2 “Fox & Friends Weekend” interview, Trump attacked Biden’s policies on immigration and the economy.

“They now want to quadruple your taxes,” Trump said.

Trump has been making claims like this since at least 2020. But he’s wrong.

The Biden administration most recently outlined its tax policy blueprint in the White House’s proposed budget to Congress for fiscal year 2025. That proposal, released in March 2024, is considered a starting point for negotiations and is not expected to be enacted in full.

Independent analyses say Biden’s proposed tax increases would amount to about $4.4 trillion over 10 years. Under current policy, and without Biden’s proposed changes, the U.S. is projected to collect $62.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

So, Biden’s policies would increase tax collections by about 7%, which is a whole lot less than “quadruple.” (Quadrupling would mean a 300% increase.)

“Although his tax increases are meaningful, they would not quadruple federal tax revenue,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow who specializes in tax policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Even the 7% figure could give a misleading impression of what a typical taxpayer can expect, because most of the proposals on Biden’s list are targeted at corporations and the wealthy.

Biden’s proposed tax increases “are primarily on very high-income households,” Pomerleau said. “He continues to stick to his loose pledge not to raise taxes on households earning less than $400,000. That generally excludes 98% of households.”

Analyses by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, a middle-of-the-road think tank, found that about 95% of Biden’s proposed tax increase would be paid by the highest 5% of household earners. (The center looked at Biden’s proposal for fiscal year 2024, but the two proposals are similar.)

Members of the bottom 40% of taxpayers, earning up to $60,400, would pay less in tax in a year than under current law, said Howard Gleckman, a Tax Policy Center senior fellow. (Technically, this is $60,400 income “per tax unit,” which means the entity filing a return, rather than “per household.” A couple filing separate tax returns would be two tax units, but one household. But laypeople can think of it in most cases as “per household,” because in a majority of cases, it refers to household earnings.)

The middle 20% of the income distribution, from $60,400 to $107,300 per tax unit, would see an increase of $20 per year. The second-highest 20%, from $107,300 to $194,800, would see an increase of $420 per year.

People from 80% to 90% of the income distribution, or from $194,800 to $284,400, would see an increase of $1,680, or a hike of about 0.9% on average.

The top 1% in income, a level starting at $993,700, would be hit hardest under Biden’s plan, seeing taxes rise by about 14.1% per year. And the top 0.1%, who make an average of about $4.4 million annually, would see a tax hike of about 20% per year.

“Even for that group, while they may see a substantial tax hike relative to current law, it would not quadruple their tax liability compared to current law,” said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the right-of-center Tax Foundation.

About 83% of the Biden tax increase would be borne by the top 1% of taxpayers.

The fraction of taxpayers earning less than $400,000 who would see small tax increases under Biden’s plan would see those increases coming not from direct tax increases but rather from the effects of Biden’s proposal to raise corporate taxes. Since a portion of Biden’s corporate tax increases would likely be passed along to consumers in higher prices, most tax analysts allocate a share of those tax increases to taxpayers.

Trump’s campaign did not answer an inquiry for this article. However, we found what could be the origin of his inaccurate statement.

Biden does propose to quadruple one particular type of tax. He proposes raising the tax on stock buybacks for certain corporations from its current 1% to 4%. In a stock buyback, the company would pay shareholders the market value of their holdings to take possession of their shares.

The Tax Foundation projects that this tax change would raise about $79 billion over 10 years, or less than 2% of the total Biden tax proposal and about one-tenth of 1% of all taxes collected during that period.

“Are there taxpayers that could face a quadrupling of their tax liability? Possibly,” Pomerleau said. “There are tens of millions of taxpayers in the U.S. in a number of unique situations, so it’s possible someone’s tax liability could quadruple. But whether that’s meaningful is another question. For example, someone could end up paying $4 a year instead of $1 a year. That is quadrupling, but their baseline liability was very low and remains low.”

Our ruling

Trump said Biden wants “to quadruple your taxes.”

Biden is proposing a tax increase of perhaps 7% over the next decade, which is far lower than the 300% increase Trump alleged.

Moreover, about 83% of the proposed Biden tax increase would be borne by the top 1% of taxpayers, a level that starts for most households just under $1 million a year in income.

Households earning up to $60,400 in reported income would see taxes go down on average, and taxpayers in the $60,400 to $107,300 range would see an annual increase of $20 on average.

We rate the statement False.