Sen. Mike Braun: If Joe Biden’s Agenda Is ‘Zero’ Cost, Why Raise Taxes?

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Sep 29, 2021

Sen. Mike Braun, a Republican from Indiana, made an appearance on the Tuesday edition of “Spicer & Co.,” where he went on to discuss his skepticism over President Joe Biden’s proposed corporate and individual tax increases.

The senator went on to cite a tweet Biden posted up on Saturday in which the president said, “my Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.” If that’s the case, Braun said, then why increase taxes?

“First of all,” the senator said, “when you’re spending money, those end up being firm targets, and you never spend less as a rule, and it grows over time. When it comes to raising revenues, they’ve thrown about 10 or 11 ideas out there, and I do believe they will coalesce around raising the individual [tax] rate from 37 back to 39.6.”

”They’ll get a corporate tax hike to 25, 26, 28, from 21. And they’ll probably do something with the capital gains tax. But they’ve got seven or eight other items there that were all for show — pixie dust — because they know even their own members wouldn’t be for that,” he continued.

Braun then made a comparison between the proposed spending in 2021 and government spending that took place in 2008 and 2009, saying it, “seems like a bargain where we only spent $800 to $900 billion.”

“We’re in a new dimension here,” the Indiana Republican said, making an allusion to the spending amounts. “[It’s] government gone wild. It’s going to unleash not only the debt consequences where rates will go up sooner or later. Inflation is already there. And now you’ve heard [Federal Reserve Chair] Jerome Powell is looking at tightening, you know, the interest rate picture.

”So many things can come together to take what was the best economy we had pre-COVID, and it looks like we’re doing everything in the book to ruin it. And it was working back then,” he said.