You almost have to feel sorry for Joe Biden. One minute he’s president of the United States, the most powerful person on earth, and the next minute his own party is begging him to disappear. Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden’s former communications director, is quoted in a Hill piece saying, “the intense level of anger or indifference to [the Bidens]… isn’t going away anytime soon.”
Biden is so out of favor he can’t even circulate an Easter message without attracting ridicule. Biden’s Easter greeting featured a family snapshot that trended on X for hours, with most viewers deciding the president had been photoshopped in, so unartfully was he positioned and so peculiarly dressed. The picture raises several questions including: where was the president if not among family members? Where was Hunter, conspicuous by his absence?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, because Biden has been keeping a low profile of late. His rare public appearances have not gone well. Several days ago, he spoke before a conference on Social Security in Chicago, his first address since leaving office in January. He used the opportunity to scare seniors into believing that the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce waste and fraud in Social Security (estimated by the Social Security Inspector General to total $72 billion from 2015 through 2022) might mean their checks will be delayed or interrupted. He claimed the Trump White House wants to “wreck” the program so they can “rob it,” using the money to reward billionaires with tax cuts.
None of that is true, of course, but the public is used to the former president misrepresenting his successor’s programs (and his own.) The reality is that President Donald Trump is attempting to preserve Social Security, which is slowly going bankrupt; ignoring reality and doing zero to fix our entitlements programs was only one of many Biden lapses.
That wasn’t the only falsehood uttered by the former president. He also said, “They want to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations.”
This statement is completely false, and Biden must know it. A new study has been released, based on IRS data, showing the actual impact of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This is important, since Congress is hard at work on a new reconciliation bill that will extend those tax changes, and perhaps add further sweeteners, like no taxes on tips, for working-class Americans.
The study, authored by Justin Haskins for the Heartland Institute, concluded that “every income bracket received a tax cut because of the TCJA, but the taxpayers who received the biggest cuts, in terms of percentage saved, went to those who earned less than $75,000.” The study shows that the average filer, making between $40,000 and $50,000, paid almost 19% less in taxes in 2022 than they did in 2017.
Wealthy filers did not fare as well. People making between $5 million and $10 million paid 2.3% less over the same period. As Haskins notes, “So much for the “billionaire tax cut” narrative.”
NEW STUDY ABOUT IRS REVEALS JUST HOW MUCH TRUMP TAX CUTS SAVED YOU
The savings have been significant for middle-class families. Americans earning between $50,000 and $75,000 saved more than $4,500 on average between 2018 and 2022 because of the 2017 tax revisions; those earning between $75,000 and $100,000 saved $5,923.
Overall, the 2017 TCJA made our tax system more – not less- progressive, something Republicans have argued for some time. In other words, the wealthy’s share of the total tax burden increased because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, contrary to Democrats’ arguments. For the left, tax cuts are instantly suspect, since they hamper their ambitions to grow the federal government.
In his Chicago address, Biden had the temerity to warn that the GOP will fund lower taxes by “running up the national debt,” an ironic caution from Biden, who added more to the debt than any president in history. At least Trump won’t be borrowing money to fund lease payments on empty office buildings or DEI programs at government agencies.
In his Chicago speech, Biden also reminisced that he learned about segregation from seeing “colored kids” go by on a bus when he was in fourth grade, another embarrassment.
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Biden’s only other recent public outing was to visit Harvard, for a closed-door session with students. Reports indicated the 82-year-old confused Iraq with Ukraine and then spilled his ice cream. Fortunately, a former aide, Mike Donilon, was there to clean up.
Outings like these have Democrats hoping that Biden will stay out of the public eye — and who can blame them? Every time Biden speaks, voters are reminded of the Big Lie – the coverup of the former president’s declining mental acuity. The Biden presidency was one of the worst frauds perpetrated on the American public in our history. It is still unclear who actually ran the government over the past four years.
The entire Democratic Party (and their allies in the liberal media) has been tarnished by their participation in that pretense, which may be one reason their approval ratings are so dismal. A new Gallup poll finds confidence in Democratic Congressional leadership at an all-time low of 25%; that compares with 39% confidence in GOP leadership. A CNN poll from last month shows Democrats’ overall approval rating also hitting record lows.
Unfortunately, Biden wants to earn some money, and raking in $300,000 per speech is one way to do that. Though there evidently have not been many takers, Biden will likely continue to show up. That will add to Democrats’ angst and may push them to undertake less subtle encouragements.
The DNC posted an Easter greeting on X that included photos of four former presidents and their families but omitted Biden. That stings.
Will it convince Biden to exit the public arena? Doubtful. After all, he’s so out of touch with reality that he still thinks he could have beaten Donald Trump.