Biden Promises Tax Hikes on the Wealthy to Pay for American Families Plan

President Joe Biden unveiled on Wednesday a sweeping $1.8 trillion plan to expand educational opportunities and child care for families, funded in part by the largest tax increases on wealthy Americans in decades -- the centerpiece of his first address to a joint session of Congress.

Called the American Families Plan, Biden’s third major legislative proposal combines $1 trillion in spending with $800 billion in tax cuts and credits for middle- and lower-income families.

The plan would make pre-kindergarten and community college free across the country, extend the child tax credit through 2025 and make permanent an expansion of the earned income tax credit to childless adults with low incomes, provide direct support to families for child care, finance teacher training and create a national paid family leave program.

The proposal follows on the heels of a $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan that has yet to be taken up by Congress and a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan that Biden has signed into law. Together, the measures would remake the U.S. tax code and social welfare programs, vastly expanding federal support even for families that consider themselves upper-middle class while substantially shifting the overall tax burden to the wealthy.

“The president has been clear that our tax system is broken when a hedge fund manager making hundreds of millions of dollars is paying taxes at a lower rate than the janitor working in his office or the housekeeper at his mansion,” White House senior adviser Anita Dunn wrote Tuesday in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. “And he’s going to take steps -- steps which are supported by the American public -- to address the fairness in the tax code.”

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