Biden’s 2025 budget combines progressive tax hikes with populist campaigns

President Joe Biden’s 2025 funding proposal to be released Monday will repackage his proposals to raise taxes on billionaires and corporations and many other requests from his 2024 budget, which is still being negotiated Capitol Hill halfway through the financial year.

Like all presidential budgets, Biden’s 2025 plan is more of a wish list than a policy document. This year, as the president faces a potential general election rematch against Donald Trump in November, his budget is also a statement of the Biden campaign’s economic platform.

According to the White House, the budget aims to reduce the federal deficit by $3 trillion over the next 10 years by imposing a minimum tax rate of 25% on the unearned income of the wealthiest households and overhauling the corporate tax code.

Biden will also seek to bolster Medicare and Social Security, in part by relying on new, federal Medicare prescription drug bargaining powers and seeking other savings in housing, health insurance and more.

Biden laid out many of the budget plan’s themes in his State of the Union address on Thursday.

“Do you really think the rich and big corporations need another $2 trillion in tax breaks? Definitely no. I will continue to fight like hell to make it fair!” he said in a fiery, partisan speech on Capitol Hill.

Biden’s populist, progressive, tax-paying funding plan is not a new proposal from his White House.

Instead, since taking office in 2021, Biden and congressional Democrats have repeatedly proposed raising taxes on the wealthiest in order to raise revenue. But the idea made very little headway even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

After Republicans took over the House majority in 2023, billionaire tax plans were put on hold, indefinitely.

House Republicans tried to pre-empt Biden’s budget proposal last week by passing their own 2025 budget resolution in a caucus vote. That proposal would aim to reduce the growing federal deficit by about $14 trillion over the next decade, in part by repealing Biden’s landmark deflationary law, which has delivered huge investments in clean energy and the green economy.

The two competing budget proposals come as no surprise in a deeply divided Washington, where compromise has been an especially rare commodity during the 2024 fiscal year.

Continued disagreements in Congress mean that six months into the fiscal year, lawmakers have yet to agree on a permanent budget.

Over the past six months, bitter battles in Congress have led to several near government shutdowns and cost former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job.

Meanwhile, the government kept the lights on through temporary spending bills.

Finally, in late February, lawmakers struck a deal on $460 billion to fund half of the government for the rest of the fiscal year. Funding for the other half must be arranged by March 22 or the government will enter a partial shutdown.

Despite that dysfunction, Biden hasn’t scaled back any part of his progressive fiscal requests for 2025, though that may have made a polarized Congress easier to swallow.

This year, the budget also represents Biden’s economic platform for his re-election campaign. As the president pursues his re-election bid, there are no signs of an abatement in the lobbying campaign against wealthy interests.

“Republicans are going to cut Social Security and give more tax cuts to the rich,” Biden said in his State of the Union address on Thursday. “I will protect and strengthen Social Security and make the rich pay their fair share!”

But voters’ feelings about Biden’s economy may be starting to brighten after months of dismal approval ratings, according to recent polls.

In a February Wall Street Journal survey, Biden received the highest grade on the economy during the campaign so far. 40 percent of voters approved of his handling of the economy, up four points from the same question in December.

Still, Biden has some catching up to do to compete with voters’ perceptions of how Trump’s economy has fared.

In a CBS/YouGov The poll, also conducted in February, found 55 percent of respondents said Biden’s policies would make prices more expensive, while only 34 percent said the same about Trump’s policies.

Meanwhile, Biden’s re-election campaign is working tirelessly to try to convince voters that post-pandemic cost-of-living spikes are actually just the product of unfair corporate pricing tactics, the same ones that the Biden administration destroyed last year.

Last week, Biden announced the launch of an unfair and illegal pricing task force, a group to be led jointly by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. The aim will be to put pressure on companies to lower prices.

“President Biden is fed up with corporate practices that unfairly raise costs for consumers,” National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard told reporters last week. “And he takes action.”