Biden Is Coming for the Tax Loopholes That the Rich Cherish

You’d expect taking money from the 1 Percent to be child’s play in a democracy. The 99 Percent have less money than the rich, but they have way more votes. In practice, Robin Hoodism isn’t so simple. Rich people can rightly make the case that they’re already picking up a big share of the nation’s tab for defense, social spending, and everything else. They can argue, more controversially, that raising their taxes will discourage them from working, inventing, and investing, to everyone’s detriment. And if all else fails, they can hire lawyers and accountants to minimize what they owe the Internal Revenue Service.

President Joe Biden is determined nonetheless to raise taxes on the rich, whose share of the national wealth has soared since the 1970s, and he has a strategy to overcome the inevitable resistance. His aim in the American Families Plan is to combine provisions in such a way that the various parts work together to make higher taxes politically defensible and their collection feasible. If he manages to get his package passed more or less intact, many of the most widely used tax minimization strategies will be foiled. The White House promises the plan “will not only reverse the biggest 2017 tax law giveaways, but reform the tax code so that the wealthy have to play by the same rules as everyone else.”