Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about his economic agenda at the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce, December 20, 2023, in Milwaukee.
The most important strategic challenge for the Biden White House is to formulate what second-term Bidenomics would be, and sell that to the voting public between now and November.
It may not be the most urgent challenge, which is to avert the danger of a larger Middle Eastern war, and/or halt Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and/or at least note that it’s the House Republicans and Donald Trump who are blocking reforms on our Southern border. But if Biden has any shot of beating Donald Trump in November, he can’t rely only on Trump’s self-subversions. He has to make a compelling case for economic policies that will palpably benefit tens of millions of Americans, and that Republican candidates won’t support.
When Biden delivers his State of the Union address on March 7, I’m certain we’ll hear many such particulars: negotiating down the prices of way more than ten prescription drugs, and not just for Medicare recipients; further measures to restrict or abolish junk fees; expanding the Child Tax Credit beyond what the proposal currently in the works in Congress would do; renewing the battle for affordable child care; and shoring up long-term funding for Social Security. The way to finance those latter three and other policies that American voters would welcome, Biden will surely say, requires raising taxes on the rich and corporations, which every poll taken in at least the past decade shows to be off-the-charts popular.
Corporate profit margins still hover at historically high levels, and while it may be a little late to be calling for an excess profits tax as such, such justifiable sentiments should fuel Biden’s initiatives to reduce economic inequality. To that end, last week Bernie Sanders, in the company of fellow senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Chris Van Hollen, introduced what I’ve long argued (way long, as some of my readers will attest) is the most salutary (both economically and in terms of the mass political education it would engender) corporate tax proposal I know: scaling the corporate income tax to the ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay, which the Dodd-Frank Act required publicly traded corporations to report on annually. The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act of 2024 would raise the tax rate by one-half of 1 percent on corporations whose CEOs (or their highest-paid employee if not the CEO) made between 50 and 100 times what their median worker made, and then more than that in increments reflecting higher ratios, up to those corporations whose CEOs make more than 500 times what their median worker makes. Corporations whose CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio came in under 50-to-1 would see no such tax hike, though you’d be hard-pressed today to find any large publicly traded U.S. corporation that meets that criterion.
Survey methodologies may differ, but every survey of the average pay ratio among the 400 or 500 largest U.S. corporations over the past 20 years has usually shown the ratio to be somewhere between 250-to-1 and 350-to-1. In the 1960s, before the Reagan-era tax cuts that more than halved the tax rates on the highest individual incomes, that ratio was roughly 20-to-1. Were the Sanders bill to get enough traction to generate real public debate, opponents might have to address not only why CEOs are now thought to be worth so much more than their workers than they were half a century ago, but also why they’re worth so much more than their mid-20th-century CEO predecessors. Do we really think that the current leaders of, say, Boeing, or General Motors, or General Electric, or Bank of America are ten times more deserving of rewards than those institutions’ leaders were during the economically stable decades of broadly shared prosperity that followed World War II?
That’s a discussion Joe Biden and the Democrats would do well to enter.
